Retro compilations have become quite commonplace this generation, but Marvel MaXimum Collection is one you should be paying attention to.
While it would be all-too easy to lament the lack of SEGA’s superhero games here – like its System 32 Spider-Man effort or the home console adventure Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin – publisher Limited Run Games deserves credit for pulling together a clutch of comic book brawlers from a variety of different publishers.
Konami’s excellent X-Men: The Arcade Game naturally headlines this selection; the 6-player 1992 beat-’em-up is widely regarded as one of the greatest in its genre, and it remains so over 30 years later.
Rollback netcode allows you to experience the 60-minute or so campaign largely as it was intended, although there’s support for up to four players locally here as well. (The PS5 doesn’t allow you to attach six different DualSense controllers, hence the limitation.)
The sprites are huge and beautifully animated, while there’s an aggressive and fluid feel to characters like Captain America and Colossus. The pixel art is vibrant and among the best ever produced, while the Engrish dialogue is charming and takes little away from the experience at all.
While we’d personally rank it below the likes of Final Fight and Capcom’s Alien vs. Predator, this game is worth the price of admission alone; it’s remarkable that it’s included alongside five others in this collection.
Data East’s Captain America and the Avengers, released in 1991, is a significant step-down from Konami’s effort – but it’s not without merit.
Playing as characters like The Vision and Hawkeye is a novelty, while Iron Man and Captain America round out the roster.
Beat-’em-up sequences are accompanied by side-scroller shooter sections which add some variety, and some of the visuals are really beautifully handled, especially when it comes to some of the later segments involving Red Skull.
It’s quite interesting enjoying the arcade game and then switching to its 1992 SEGA Genesis port, which shrinks the sprite sizes and dumbs down some of the graphical effects, but maintains the same general campaign structure.
The NES version is basically a different game, adopting a side-scroller format with light RPG mechanics, and therefore its inclusion adds value as well.
Sadly, the SNES edition is absent here – although that version was originally licensed to Mindscape alongside the Game Boy and Game Gear ports, so it may have proven a headache for Limited Run Games to secure.
Fortunately, both versions of Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage are present, a 1994 brawler probably best remembered on the SEGA Genesis due to its unique blood-red cartridge.
This game has some wonderful comic book-style cutscenes, but its gameplay is a little rote and letdown by enemies with humongous health bars.
Its successor, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety – released in 1995 – is worse, repurposing much of the gameplay from its predecessor without the same level of care.
We’d hesitate to describe either of these games as cheap cash-ins – there absolutely is entertainment to be had here if you can overcome some awkward level design – but there are much better brawlers in this bundle alone, and that makes their shortcomings stick out more.
Speaking of which, our least favourite game in this compilation – and one we’ve always disliked, ever since owning the original Game Gear cartridge – is Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge.
Released in 1992, this game was – perhaps unsurprisingly to the AVGN fans among you – published by LJN, and it just plays horribly.
While it did get good reviews at the time and is quite creative with its use of different characters, its controls are far too fiddly and objectives too opaque to enjoy.
Its soundtrack is superb – well, on the SNES anyway – and it’s cool playing as some underappreciated characters like Gambit, but the stiff controls and unbalanced difficulty make this one to skip.
One thing we will mention is that all of the home console ports come with toggleable cheats which can help with your overall enjoyment; these allow you to enable things like Unlimited Lives or Invincibility, which are nice options if you just want to experience the games without the overbearing difficulty.
Each game also offers Rewind and Save States, while there’s a really dense CRT filter you can use to set the strength of the scanlines and curve of your simulated monitor screen.
Before we focus too much on the accoutrements, though, we should mention the final game in the bundle: 1990’s Silver Surfer for the NES.
This game is basically a scrolling shooter, which switches between R-Type-inspired horizontal segments and 1942-esque vertical sequences.
While it feels fairly unrelated to Silver Surfer as a character, the gameplay is rock-solid, although it can sometimes be difficult to detect which parts of the scene are hazards. Nevertheless, we really enjoyed playing through this for the first time, and the soundtrack is top notch.
You can listen to all of the audio on demand via a built-in Music Player, with some of the tracks from X-Men: The Arcade Game being particular ear worms.
There are also a ton of browsable artworks, boxes, and even design documents. We really loved reading through the hand-written plans for Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, which is just wonderful preservation overall.
Conclusion
Marvel MaXimum Collection is worth the price of entry for X-Men: The Arcade Game alone, but there’s a lot to love about this bundle. While not every game included is an all-timer, there’s a good enough mix here to make this a compelling collection of superhero brawlers, and the quality-of-life inclusions are excellent overall.
