What parents need to know
MARVEL MaXimum Collection is a collection of the following games:
- X-Men: The Arcade Game (Arcade):
- Captain America and The Avengers (Arcade, MEGA, 8-bit):
- Spider-Man/Venom: Maximum Carnage (SUPER, MEGA):
- Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety (SUPER, MEGA):
- Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge (SUPER, MEGA, PORTABLE, GEAR):
- Silver Surfer (8-bit)
Some games are available in 2, 3 or 4 versions.
SUPER is the Super Nintendo version.
MEGA stands for the Mega Drive/Genesis version.
Laptop -> GameBoy
GEAR -> GameGear
8-bit -> Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
These are beat’em up and platform games with characters from X-Men and Marvel, released in the 90s.
Note: A code has been offered to us by the publisher for review purposes. This does not influence our opinion.
Details
Level of experience required
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Our opinion
In most retro game compilations, there are 1, 2 or 3 high-quality games that convince us to buy it.
In MARVEL MaXimum Collection, it’s harder to find. Konami’s X-Men The Arcade Game is clearly highlighted in the promotion, but it may be a bit overrated. It ends quickly, is not as interesting as the following Konami beat’em ups: Asterix, Simpsons, TMNT.
Once finished, once online and once offline, we find ourselves with beat’em ups, platform games and shoot’em ups from Software Creations. And they are of poor quality. There’s a reason we don’t hear about Software Creations anymore these days.
From a video game heritage preservation point of view, it’s great what Limited Run Games has managed to do: look for all its licenses, all its game versions, all the manuals, artworks, music of them. This makes all its games accessible to a new generation of players. The games are available in US or JP versions when possible. It is possible to adjust the difficulty, to start a game directly at levels, 2,3,4,5,6 of some games. And X-Men The Arcade Game is available in 2, 4 and 6 player versions! This changes the format of the image depending on the version.
From a fun point of view, these are not interesting games to play. It can be good, from a game design study point of view, to see what is wrong, and how we could have corrected it.
Only X-Men The Arcade Game has an online mode with 6 players, and it doesn’t really work well: it often lags, the collisions are very random. Especially since each player can add tokens at will in the game, causing a sound effect with each entry. Online gamers often spam this button, and make the sound experience particularly unpleasant.
A flaw that has long been corrected in other arcade game adaptations and makes us wonder why it reappears here.
Another flaw is that you can’t customize the game controls. We sometimes end up with jumps instead of attacks in GameBoy and GameGear titles.
No crossplay between the different consoles either for the X-Men The Arcade Game, you will have to make do with the empty lobbies on the 4 platforms.
Finally, as is often the case in game compilations, the MS-DOS versions of them are missing.
All this accumulation of flaws makes us say that you can unfortunately easily do without Marvel MaXimum Collection.
