Ruby-quartz-colored glasses might be required.
The six games present in Marvel MaXimum Collection are weirdly important to me. Growing up in the ‘90s as a Marvel Comics fan and a player of video games, I spent more time than is recommended with the collective sum of these games. I have fond memories with X-Men and Captain America in the arcade. I rocked out to the Green Jelly soundtrack of Spider-Man & Venom Maximum Carnage on Super Nintendo. I somehow ended up with a lightly used complete-in-box copy of that wretched Silver Surfer game from my local video rental store when it phased out NES games. I owned Arcade’s Revenge for Game Boy and sincerely tried to play it to completion. All of that pretext is here to say that I anticipated this collection and it more or less delivered on what I wanted out of it, but it’s also a harsh reminder that some of these games aren’t very good.
The highlight of the collection is definitely the Konami-made X-Men arcade game, which features online play with rollback. Playing the online out in the wild, it runs totally fine. You lose the joy of the same-room arcade experience, but it’s a good way to enjoy a six-player arcade game. Playing through that game in local multiplayer is still a blast, complete with its endearing voice samples and bopping music. As far as I can tell, the port of this game seems solid. There are options to play it in the more traditional four-player mode or the widescreen six-player mode. It’s not the same magic as crowding around the majestic arcade cabinet with five other people, but it’s still grand retro beat-’em-up fun.
The next best game is easily Captain America and the Avengers from Data East, which features three different versions: the superior arcade version, the solid Sega Genesis port, and the unique and terrible NES game. A lot of my nostalgia with this game comes from the Genesis version, which was the better of the console ports (there is also a Super Nintendo version not included; it’s not a loss), but the arcade version is where it’s at here. This doesn’t have online play, but it pairs well with the X-Men game as a bombastic brawler with beloved characters, cheesy voice lines, and an enjoyable pace. The NES game only lets you play as Captain America or Hawkeye and it’s a confusing and mediocre side-scroller. I’m thrilled it’s here for historical purposes, but this ain’t a lost gem. Sadly, it’s not the worst game in the collection.
The worst game in the collection is tied between Spider-Man and X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge and Silver Surfer. The most interesting thing I can say about Arcade’s Revenge is that it is academically fascinating to see how they took the same basic setup and mechanics and were never able to find the fun across four different versions of the game. The Game Boy, Game Gear, Genesis, and Super Nintendo versions are all here and they all more or less follow the same structure and they all universally are confusing and miserable. You can look at the instruction manual for each version of the game (and all of the other non-arcade games here), but these are all nestled away in an area separate from the games. The manuals are not accessible at all while you play the game, so they’re more a historical artifact than a tool to explain the game. When you’re playing games, the pause menu has a “How To Play” button but for the purposes of Arcade’s Revenge, it doesn’t help me to know that the face buttons are “Jump, Action 1, Action 2, and Action 3.” It’d be cool if any of the games provides more context into how to actually play the games. This isn’t an issue with the relatively straightforward beat-’em-ups, but they make the more complex games even worse.
Anyway, the Silver Surfer game is an uber-difficult side-scrolling shooter where you spend most of your time feeling bad that you keep dying and Silver Surfer is sad. But I’m stoked this game is here because the soundtrack is an absolute all-timer from the Follin Brothers. The Follins also did yeoman’s work with the Arcade’s Revenge soundtrack as well, but the Silver Surfer one is a masterpiece.
Rounding out the collection are two overlong Spider-Man and Venom beat-’em-ups that each have a Genesis and Super Nintendo version in this collection. Maximum Carnage and Separation Anxiety are notable for being relatively faithful adaptations of comic book arcs from the era, complete with some nifty comic book panel cut scenes. The rough edges of these games are sanded off thanks to included cheats for infinite lives and/or health. These games are generally unforgiving and hard in addition to being very long for the genre, so both the ability to save and cheat are very welcome.
Every game (except for online X-Men) has rewind functionality. Some of the games have advertisements, artwork, and design documents. The overall presentation is adequate, but it is a bummer to have this collection have no real context for these games. Some of these games aren’t good, but it’s interesting how they’re not good. For example, Arcade’s Revenge is the crappy game it is largely because it was made under intense deadlines with little resources. It’d be neat to have any of that context in this game. Instead, I can just be frustrated with four versions of a game and guess at what “Action 2” does on the controller.
At the end of the day, I got what I wanted out of Marvel MaXimum Collection. I can play the arcade versions of X-Men and Captain America and the Avengers in the comfort of my own home. I can relive ‘90s video game rental memories with Arcade’s Revenge and the Spider-Man/Venom beat-’em-ups. I can look fondly on the disappointment that hit me when I played that Silver Surfer game as a kid for the first time. These games are all here with basically every relevant version of them on offer. It’s just relatively barebones aside from the X-Men online multiplayer (fingers crossed it works well) and in an era of Digital Eclipse documentary collection, the standard should be higher.
