A Marvel collection worth every quarter
By Paul Hunter
I still remember a time when walking up to a Marvel arcade cabinet was an event. My friends and I would sometimes spend hours playing the latest Marvel games, pumping in quarters without hesitation. Limited Run Games has tapped into exactly that vibe with Marvel MaXimum Collection, pulling six retro titles from Konami, Data East, and Acclaim (now owned by Throwback Entertainment) together through licensing negotiations across the three separate publishers.
The collection covers arcade originals alongside home console releases on NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, SNES, and Mega Drive, with quality-of-life features built in across every title. It’s a nostalgic package made especially for gamers who love Marvel and retro gaming. Is this Marvel compilation worth a spot in your library? Let’s find out!
The headliner is Konami's X-Men: The Arcade Game, a 1992 six-player beat-'em-up that was among the top grossing arcade games at the time. You pick from Colossus, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, or Dazzler and push through Magneto's forces including Sentinels, Juggernaut, and Wendigo. Online play with rollback netcode and cross-play is exclusive to this title, and two, four, and six-player cabinet options are all available.
Data East's Captain America and the Avengers from 1991 is the other arcade brawler, putting Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, and Hawkeye on a mission to take down Red Skull. The arcade version is the main version, but the Mega Drive port and an NES version that plays as a completely different side-scrolling adventure game are both included.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage from 1994 is based on a real Marvel Comics arc where Carnage escapes from an asylum and takes control of New York City. Comic panel cutscenes and a Green Jelly punk soundtrack set it apart, and its 1995 sequel, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety, includes a password save system, with SNES and Mega Drive versions of both games in the package.
Silver Surfer for NES from 1990 is a hybrid scrolling shooter with a notorious difficulty reputation, and Spider-Man and X-Men in Arcade's Revenge from 1992 rounds out the collection in all four of its versions: SNES, Mega Drive, Game Gear, and Game Boy.
Bonus content includes magazine ads, box art, instruction manuals, design documents, and a built-in Music Player. Every title has excellent new quality-of-life features including save states, rewind, configurable difficulty, and toggleable cheats.
All considered, the collection is a thorough archive of some of the best retro Marvel games in existence.
Captain America and the Avengers is a different kind of brawler. The campaign mixes beat-'em-up brawling with side-scrolling shooter stages, and the levels have destructible objects and background structures you can actually climb. I spent the most time with the Mega Drive version, which runs faster than the arcade, supports basic combos, and has combat that connects with more satisfying feedback.
Silver Surfer is a scrolling shooter where one-hit kills and a hitbox that takes the surfboard into account make it a punishing experience. However, you can flip on unlimited lives from the cheats menu or use the rewind feature to make it more forgiving. The game also features orbs power-ups that give Silver Surfer an extra shot direction, and repositioning them to fire forward, below, or behind you is key to getting through the tougher stages.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage has you playing as either Spider-Man or Venom across its beat-'em-up campaign, and the two feel very different, Spider-Man moves faster while Venom hits harder. The game also features wall-crawling, web swinging, and projectile attacks, and boss fights regularly throw two enemies at you at once. Meanwhile, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety lets you choose one character for the full run and adds two-player co-op. Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, across all four versions, has confusing objectives and controls that take some getting used to, but save states and rewind make it far more approachable than it would be otherwise.
All in all, the quality-of-life tools are a big part of what makes this collection more approachable, and the majority of games in the package are a lot of fun to return to.
Maximum Carnage’s comic panel cutscenes stand apart from the other beat-’em-ups in the package and give the game a nice comic book feel. I thought this game looked particularly great using the CRT screen filters that lets you set scanline intensity and screen curve separately, with convincing results.
The soundtracks across this collection are catchy. Silver Surfer’s score from the Follin Brothers is one of the finest NES soundtracks ever made, and the built-in Music Player gives you access to every track from every game on demand. Maximum Carnage’s Green Jelly punk soundtrack is also a standout, and the X-Men voice samples are charmingly cheesy in the way that only ’90s arcade games could manage.
Emulation quality is solid across the board, with no noticeable input lag in any games. There’s no button remapping option unfortunately, but it’s a minor callout in an otherwise polished collection.
Final Score: 7.5/10 - Good
Developer: Limited Run Games
Publisher: Limited Run Games
Genre: Shoot 'em Up, Beat 'em Up, Action
Modes: Single-player, Multiplayer
By Paul Hunter
I still remember a time when walking up to a Marvel arcade cabinet was an event. My friends and I would sometimes spend hours playing the latest Marvel games, pumping in quarters without hesitation. Limited Run Games has tapped into exactly that vibe with Marvel MaXimum Collection, pulling six retro titles from Konami, Data East, and Acclaim (now owned by Throwback Entertainment) together through licensing negotiations across the three separate publishers.
The collection covers arcade originals alongside home console releases on NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, SNES, and Mega Drive, with quality-of-life features built in across every title. It’s a nostalgic package made especially for gamers who love Marvel and retro gaming. Is this Marvel compilation worth a spot in your library? Let’s find out!
Games in the Collection
The MARVEL MaXimum Collection packs in six games spanning Marvel gaming from the late ’80s through the mid-’90s, and includes multiple platform versions of most titles make the library feel considerably bigger.The headliner is Konami's X-Men: The Arcade Game, a 1992 six-player beat-'em-up that was among the top grossing arcade games at the time. You pick from Colossus, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, or Dazzler and push through Magneto's forces including Sentinels, Juggernaut, and Wendigo. Online play with rollback netcode and cross-play is exclusive to this title, and two, four, and six-player cabinet options are all available.
Data East's Captain America and the Avengers from 1991 is the other arcade brawler, putting Captain America, Iron Man, Vision, and Hawkeye on a mission to take down Red Skull. The arcade version is the main version, but the Mega Drive port and an NES version that plays as a completely different side-scrolling adventure game are both included.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage from 1994 is based on a real Marvel Comics arc where Carnage escapes from an asylum and takes control of New York City. Comic panel cutscenes and a Green Jelly punk soundtrack set it apart, and its 1995 sequel, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety, includes a password save system, with SNES and Mega Drive versions of both games in the package.
Silver Surfer for NES from 1990 is a hybrid scrolling shooter with a notorious difficulty reputation, and Spider-Man and X-Men in Arcade's Revenge from 1992 rounds out the collection in all four of its versions: SNES, Mega Drive, Game Gear, and Game Boy.
Bonus content includes magazine ads, box art, instruction manuals, design documents, and a built-in Music Player. Every title has excellent new quality-of-life features including save states, rewind, configurable difficulty, and toggleable cheats.
All considered, the collection is a thorough archive of some of the best retro Marvel games in existence.
Gameplay and Mechanics
From a gameplay perspective, X-Men: The Arcade Game still delivers even after all these years. The beat-'em-up gameplay is smooth, and the six-player cabinet version is the one to start with: it widens the screen and pushes more enemies on screen at once, which changes the feel of the whole game. I went through a full online co-op session on Xbox Series X and it ran silky smooth the whole time, with no input lag. Cross-play also worked seamlessly.Captain America and the Avengers is a different kind of brawler. The campaign mixes beat-'em-up brawling with side-scrolling shooter stages, and the levels have destructible objects and background structures you can actually climb. I spent the most time with the Mega Drive version, which runs faster than the arcade, supports basic combos, and has combat that connects with more satisfying feedback.
Silver Surfer is a scrolling shooter where one-hit kills and a hitbox that takes the surfboard into account make it a punishing experience. However, you can flip on unlimited lives from the cheats menu or use the rewind feature to make it more forgiving. The game also features orbs power-ups that give Silver Surfer an extra shot direction, and repositioning them to fire forward, below, or behind you is key to getting through the tougher stages.
Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage has you playing as either Spider-Man or Venom across its beat-'em-up campaign, and the two feel very different, Spider-Man moves faster while Venom hits harder. The game also features wall-crawling, web swinging, and projectile attacks, and boss fights regularly throw two enemies at you at once. Meanwhile, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety lets you choose one character for the full run and adds two-player co-op. Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, across all four versions, has confusing objectives and controls that take some getting used to, but save states and rewind make it far more approachable than it would be otherwise.
All in all, the quality-of-life tools are a big part of what makes this collection more approachable, and the majority of games in the package are a lot of fun to return to.
Presentation and Audio
X-Men: The Arcade Game still looks great after more than thirty years. The sprites are large and well-animated, the colour palette is vivid and pulled straight from '90s Marvel comic art, and the character animations have held up impressively well. Playing the six-player version that's packed with heroes and enemies still makes a strong visual impression. Captain America and the Avengers has smaller sprites, but the stage variety is strong and the later Red Skull segments are among the most visually impressive moments in the collection for their era.Maximum Carnage’s comic panel cutscenes stand apart from the other beat-’em-ups in the package and give the game a nice comic book feel. I thought this game looked particularly great using the CRT screen filters that lets you set scanline intensity and screen curve separately, with convincing results.
The soundtracks across this collection are catchy. Silver Surfer’s score from the Follin Brothers is one of the finest NES soundtracks ever made, and the built-in Music Player gives you access to every track from every game on demand. Maximum Carnage’s Green Jelly punk soundtrack is also a standout, and the X-Men voice samples are charmingly cheesy in the way that only ’90s arcade games could manage.
Emulation quality is solid across the board, with no noticeable input lag in any games. There’s no button remapping option unfortunately, but it’s a minor callout in an otherwise polished collection.
The Verdict
Marvel MaXimum Collection is a great retro gaming package, and I had a blast checking out the six games in their included platform versions. X-Men: The Arcade Game with rollback netcode and cross-play is the centrepiece, and Captain America and the Avengers is a strong runner up. The three Spider-Man games are nice additions too, and while Silver Surfer has a steep challenge, the rewind feature makes it more playable. Save states and toggleable cheats, including unlimited lives, make every title in the collection accessible at any skill level. Any gamer with nostalgia for this era of Marvel gaming should pick this collection up.Final Score: 7.5/10 - Good
MARVEL MaXimum Collection details
Platform: PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo SwitchDeveloper: Limited Run Games
Publisher: Limited Run Games
Genre: Shoot 'em Up, Beat 'em Up, Action
Modes: Single-player, Multiplayer