I was never a huge comic book nerd growing up, but I always had a soft spot when it came to Spider-Man. I ate up the cartoon like the sugar injected cereal that accompanied it’s viewings. I dumped a small fortune of birthday money on action figures and playsets. When all the parental planets aligned and I was able to rent a game from our local Hastings, I would usually pick up Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage.

To give you a brief overview, Maximum Carnage is a early 90’s beat’em up out out by LJN/Acclaim that features Spidey and Venom as they try to put a stop to the serial murder Cletus Kasady, better known as the symbiote infused supervillain Carnage.

While I had some really great games for the SNES, Maximum Carnage still stands out to me as the most memorable. Since we were a Nintendo town for the most part, and only one of my friends even had a Genesis, I didn’t know this game came out on anything other than SNES. That being the case, I still hold it among my top favorite SNES games of all time. When I found it recently at a used bookstore, I decided to pick it up to see if it actually was any good or if my memories were blurred thru the lens of nostalgia and youthful fanboy-ism.

"He's the ultimate insanity, in case you were wondering."

The first thing I realized as I played thru the initial level is that I was really terrible at this game as a kid. I mean REALLY terrible. In a few minutes of playing I was further than my 10 year old self would ever dream of achieving. I know I rented this game at least a half a dozen times, and I’m fairly sure I only beat the first level once. I also realized that there is a decent amount of strategy in how you have to handle a group of thugs; tactics that my younger self wouldn’t be able to comprehend or pull off through his mixture of confusion and button mashing. Moves I did as a kid that I had chalked up to flukes, like webbing two baddies and smashing them together overhead, were now no problem to pull off. I was swinging and slugging like an old pro.

As I scaled the side of a building, using my spectacular spidey sense to avoid Shreak’s sonic blasts and Dopple-ganger’s swinging kicks to the head, I thought about how much I used to dread this part. It was a short walkway to certain doom for my younger, chubbier self. As an adult, I was showing these rouges how it’s done. I made short work of them, until a cheap shot sent me over the edge of the building and crashing into the ground below. Having only made it this far once, it caught me off guard for a moment before I realized it was a scripted event. I played my share of beat’em ups growing up, but I can’t remember any that had stronger story elements than Maximum Carnage. Between the scripted events, the comic panel-like cutscenes, and the cameos by other Marvel heros and villains, this brawler still has a lot of charm.

"Spider-Man can't get enough hobo-punching"

In addition to being charming, it’s also incredibly quirky. The cartridge is encased in a bright, blood red plastic shell, with an ominously hungry Cletus Kasady ready to eat your face. It also was one of the first games on my radar to feature licensed music, and while I had no idea who Green Jelly was, I felt like the game was something special because of it. And while a lot of beat’em ups gave you a choice of characters to play, Maximum Carnage tied it into the story, requiring you to make some progress before having the payoff of playing as Venom.

I had to put the controller down after the first 3 or 4 levels, but I’m looking forward to having enough time to finish the game, and sharing that experience with my son. While I’m sure he won’t understand exactly how he webbed a crook and threw him off screen, or smashed those two thugs in the air, if history is any indication he won’t care. He’ll just have fun doing it.

Tags: Acclaim, Beat-em-up, Friday Old Games, Green Jelly, LJN, SNES, SNES 20th Anniversary, Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2011 at 11:06 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.