Marvel Maximum Collection Review (Switch eShop / Switch)

The prize in Limited Run's Marvel Maximum Collection, unquestionably, is Konami’s 1992 X-Men: The Arcade Game. Famously, it holds a Guinness World Record for being the only arcade beat ‘em up to support six simultaneous players. This port allows you to switch between two, four and six player options — in line with its original cabinet variations — and take the game online with rollback net code.

Superb fun, and elevated considerably through multiplayer, while its character movesets are somewhat limited by modern standards, early '90s Konami were such a tour de force that they could barely put a foot wrong. It offers a thrilling romp through the X-Men universe of yesteryear, featuring a cast of six favourites — Colossus, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, and Dazzler — fighting against Magneto’s hordes: Sentinels, Juggernaut, Wendigo, and more.

The backgrounds are lovingly detailed; the sprites and animation are excellent; the colour scheme is straight out of a '90s comic book page; and the game is full of superb voice samples, grammatically incorrect or otherwise. It does work better in multiplayer, although with six on the screen, the action gets confusing.

While this is the collection’s high point, and the only title with online functionality, elsewhere there’s plenty to enjoy. The frontend and quality-of-life features are surprisingly well done, with archival materials for each game comprising flyers, manuals, and design documents. Save states are available, as is a rewind function; you can configure the difficulty level of every title; and the CRT screen filters are very granular, allowing fine adjustments that render really well.

What’s interesting about the Marvel Maximum Collection is how far-flung the titles are, including arcade games from Data East, as well as Super Nintendo, Mega Drive, NES, and Game Boy titles from Software Creations. Many of these come under the LJN label, the best recognised of which is probably the NES's Silver Surfer (1990), a shoot 'em up made infamous by The Angry Video Game Nerd.

And honestly, it’s a game that gets a bad rap. Yes, the hit-box is infuriating, and being unable to discern what constitutes impassable objects is a test, but play enough to learn layouts and win power-ups and orbs, and it’s certainly not the worst of its kind, nor the worst of this collection. It’s also carried by a great soundtrack from Tim Follin.

Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge (1992) is probably mid-tier in terms of the package offerings, although a lot will depend on your nostalgic mileage. Here you have SNES, Mega Drive, Game Gear, and Game Boy versions. The handheld ones are curious but poor, and the 16-bit versions remain tough, frustrating, and confusing to get through. The Mega Drive release is best, but generally its collision detection, sharing lives between characters, and a final boss with some painful RNG persist across all iterations. Still, if you exploit Gambit’s stage glitch to stockpile lives (or use the rewind function), there’s some enjoyment to be had getting through it.

Spider-Man Maximum Carnage (1994) is a Final Fight-style scrolling beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive, and it’s pretty mundane, all things considered. It’s notable for being based on an actual crossover comic miniseries, and having a soundtrack by '90s punk band Green Jelly.

These aspects make it cool in a throwback kind of way, but the action is limited and repetitive. With little variation in its enemies or action, it quickly becomes a slog. The backgrounds are fairly uninspired, and it seems to go on for so long that your interest is likely to wane long before you reach the final boss. A little interesting trivia: Maximum Carnage, with its special red cartridge, was never released in Japan, and with an already fairly limited print run, the original US version of the game can fetch up to $5000 in stores there.

However lame Maximum Carnage is, though, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety — its 1995 follow-up — is somehow slightly worse. It carries over most of the flaws of its predecessor, throws in some really ugly pre-rendered backdrops, and feels incredibly dull. Its monotony is alleviated slightly by allowing you to switch between Spidey and Venom, and it has a ton of great Marvel cameos — but the combat is imprecise and muddled, and too limited in scope to hold your attention. Both the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive versions are present, although the former wins out for better colour breadth.

The more unlikely addition to the Maximum Collection is Data East’s 1991 beat 'em up Captain America and The Avengers. Predating Konami’s arcade attempt by a year, it’s far less visually impressive with much smaller sprites, but has an enormous amount of charm to it. The cutscenes look great, and there’s some nice variation between beat-'em-up stages and shooting style action, whether through the skies or underwater.

There are four characters to choose from, including the eponymous Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, and Hawkeye. On your crusade to defeat ultra-villain Red Skull, you also get to battle some enormous bosses, but sadly the combat is very limited, and as a result, it becomes naturally repetitive.

Nevertheless, it’s enjoyable to experience, and worth playing through with a credit feed. What’s puzzling most about this particular port, however, is where the multiplayer option is. Not only can you not realise the original’s four-player antics, but it seems like two-player isn’t available, either. Even odder is that you need to pick your character from a pre-boot screen — probably aping the original cabinet’s coin slot fixtures — but once inside the game there doesn’t seem to be any way to switch characters at the continue screen.

This heavily leans toward the fact that it — and probably everything else — is little more than a rom collection. While that’s to be expected, it would have been nice for the title to have enjoyed the same attention and augmentations given to Konami’s arcade game. The Mega Drive and NES versions of Captain America and The Avengers are also included, with the latter being a wholly different, pretty engrossing (but considerably tough) platform game, and the former a ropey, inferior arcade port.

Data East had one more Marvel arcade game — Avengers in Galactic Storm (1995) — that didn't make the cut. Being a fighting game, it would have offered some much-needed variety to the package, and its absence is something of a missed opportunity.