Been a little bit since I've featured some superhero action on the Retro Reboots. There's still plenty to sift through, but a breather is required. One of the last times I revisited the Manchester-based developer Software Creations (the team behind a lot of those hated LJN games), I dabbled in some Spider-Man and X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, a game that's fun to test the effects of negative reinforcement in agitated badgers. Maximum Carnage fares better, but has its share of problems.

Spider-Man and Venom in Maximum Carnage was released for the SNES and Sega Mega Drive in 1994, based on the 14 comic crossover story. I don't remember entirely, but I think this story arc is one of the first times I recall Venom being portrayed in more of an anti-hero light. His popularity was incredibly high around this time, I remember tons of Venom T-shirts in school, and in between doing tons of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles art, I drew a healthy amount of Spidey and Venom in the fourth grade.

A lot of Spider-Man's ventures in video games were never really that good on home consoles throughout this period, Maximum Carnage is at least playable. It's a brawler with co-op, the comic book story panels add some style, so there's some value in it, but there isn't a lot about it that puts it in the upper tier of beat'em ups that were available. 

Some of the positives, the sprites look pretty good and are quite large. With rich coloring and an abundance of dark, heavy lines, Maximum Carnage does a nice job of emulating the comic book pages. A caveat, this game really drew the short straw on the random bad guys generator. Save for Shades, the enemies stand out in a pretty distracting manner, compared to the detail that the notable Marvel heroes and villains pack. 

The music is awesome. Production is provided by Green Jelly, and while the instrumentals weren't the authentic productions, the digitized versions of these tracks are still pretty tasty. It floored me years later after I started listening to Black Sabbath in junior high to hear "The Mob Rules" in a SNES and Genesis game. The punches and throws have a hearty *thwack* to them, making it a little more satisfying to pound on enemies.    

The gameplay is fine, but even by brawler metrics, Maximum Carnage does not offer a lot in the controls department to keep one mentally invested, given the game's long play time. I'll give it credit for having a block button, something that was fairly uncommon for the genre, and the ability to klonk two enemies' heads together by standing precariously between them, is fun to do. Hit detection can be a little iffy and a touch slow, and your moveset is fairly thin, both Spidey and Brock play exactly the same. This doesn't help that aside from being a very long game, MC is also a very tough one, with tons of cheap damage and kills.

On average, your coin-operated arcade button-mashing brawling game would run about 8 to 10 stages. Maximum Carnage is nearly double that, and the boss battles with Doppleganger and Shriek, sometimes Carnage himself thrown in, generally involve getting your face re-arranged with little room to breath or get out of dodge. This ends up making what should be a stress-relieving action game an incredibly grueling endeavor. 

Can you do worse than Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage? Yeah, easily. It sits right in the mediocre line of 16-bit action titles. There's just better out there to enjoy, but it's at least to see a Spider-Man game that isn't a total headache to play. A brawler shouldn't be more than 1 hour of play time. Serviceable, with some pretty sweet music and faithfulness to the source story, but suffers from many of the same problems as The Death and Return of Superman. Just overstays its welcome with a bland skill set, repetitive stages, hit accuracy scoring is a total pain in the ass, and overly stubborn difficulty. The passage of time has been more kind to it, I've noticed. And hey, it still isn't Separation Anxiety.