Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage
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Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is a side-scrolling beat 'em up game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Mega Drive/Genesis, developed by Software Creations and published by Acclaim Entertainment and its subsidiary LJN in 1994. The game, based on the comic book story arc of the same name, features numerous heroes, including Spider-Man, Venom and their allies from the Marvel Comics fictional universe like Captain America, Black Cat, Iron Fist, Cloak and Dagger, Deathlok, Morbius and Firestar, all teaming up to battle an onslaught of villains led by Carnage, including Shriek, Doppelganger, Demogoblin and Carrion.
The first prints of the game for the Super NES and Genesis were sold in red-colored cartridges. Later prints came in standard-colored cartridges. It was followed up by a sequel titled Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety.
Universal Studios Orlando used Maximum Carnage as the theme for a haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights in 2002.
Good Qualities
- Awesome soundtrack, including "The Mob Rules" by Black Sabbath, which is really cool!
- Cool gameplay and hit detection is fine and good.
- Good controls that are tight and responsive, and also fast paced, Spider-Man will never be unresponsive at all.
- Gameplay can be repetitive, but the repetitiveness can be broken by climbing on or swinging off of walls.
- LJN normally published terrible games, so for a game to be this good is actually saying a lot, especially when you compare their terrible games with some decent LJN-published games like this one.
- The comic book-style cutscenes look good for the times.
- Carnage is an awesome villain.
- The first prints came with cool red-colored cartridges, similar to those of the SNES port of Doom.
- Unlike most LJN games out there, the graphics are really good, colorful and detailled, even for the time.
Bad Qualities
- The animations are quite stiff.
- In the Super Nintendo version, fat enemies often knock you down and take away your health even a second before they actually attack you.
- Secret areas where health and continue pick-ups are stored are very unintuitive and almost impossible to find without a guide. For example, one can be found by doing a special attack in front of an ATM machine while facing right and another one by kicking a background element in the Fantastic Four laboratory. Given that the game becomes insanely hard fairly early and you definitely need all the lives and continue icons you can get, this can be a huge problem.
- At times, when playing this on an emulator, it can get extremely difficult to control.
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