What I thought back during release….

Awesome! Maximum Carnage is one of the coolest games I’ve ever played! Playing as Spider Man or Venom through this Final Fight like game never gets old. I love how you can call upon random Marvel heroes to aid and assist you through some tough battles. Boss fights are entertaining, though Carnage is hard as hell. Whoever this Green Jelly band is, their music sounds great with the action going on. I wish the difficulty wasn’t so high. Otherwise Maximum Carnage impresses me in so many ways and is worth playing!

Rating Then: 8.4

What I think years later….

Before I even get to the game, I recently discovered that LJN, the undisputed King of Crap in the 8 bit world, published Maximum Carnage. Then again, I enjoyed playing Wolverine on the NES when I first started playing it, so I wasn’t all there sometimes. But now that I found out about LJN having a hand at Maximum Carnage in some form, it makes this Retro Re-Review all the more interesting. I really liked Maximum Carnage, and even had a letter of mine published in Game Players, asking about hidden bonus rooms. It’s been maybe five or more years since I’ve played this one. Will I find the same joy I once found when I was younger, or will this game make me want to dive head first into Cloak’s pits of dimensional hell?

Seconds after I power the game on, that Green Jelly music goes off and nostalgia starts to hit me. For a cart, I thought that Maximum Carnage did a commendable job at producing quality music to go with the action in the game. Even today, the intro music sounds great. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

The game opens with some quality comic book story board art, which from what I remembered from the actual comic series, does Mark Bagley’s art justice. Very clean, well detailed. Extremely impressive for 16 bit standards. After a lengthy amount of these, I jump right into the game.

Mark Bagley's art translate to a near perfection, with quite a bit of detail faithfully ported over.

Movement feels loose enough. Attacking is quite quick and simple. I can pull enemies to me, tie them up in web, shield myself and if timed right, I can grab an enemy on either side of me with my webbing, and pull them together for a nice thud. I even remember how to pull off my strong attack that lowers my health with each use. There’s even a dedicated web swinging button. Quite easy to get into, whether you’re new or coming back for a long absence. Attacks are easy to get off, work well enough, and its fun.

While enemies look decent and the background looks pretty good, Spider Man himself looks weird. Looks like he has breasts, and his elbows are perfectly rounded. He looks really silly in general. While the normal thugs do look decent, they are recycled way too often. Why do I have to fight four trench coat thugs with four different color trench coats and four different color spiked hairdos? Are they related or something? Same thing with the triplets with backwards baseball caps in different colors, sunglasses and bulls-eye shirts with different colors. Variation is severely lacking here. Stuff like that never really phased me back in the days, mostly because repetition was quite normal.

I can't be the only one that notices some similarities between the trench-coat clad enemies of Maximum Carnage and the hoodie wearing ones in Final Fight. The hair, glasses, stance....

Despite the early criticism about some cheap AI tactics, this is still as fun as I remembered. The music is so well done throughout. I’ve never heard of Green Jelly before I played Maximum Carnage, and I’ve never heard of them since. Thank goodness they existed though, cause their music has helped the game flow along well and has fit in perfectly overall.

I’m a few levels past the first two now. I’ll be honest….it’s feeling quite repetitive right now. Sound effects are starting to come off as low grade and cheap. Why does it make a weird sound, like I’m banging the inside of an oil drum with a tree branch, when I shoot my web and tie someone up? When I beat an enemy, he gives the same death yell as I give when I lose a life. It’s all recycled way too much. Not to mention that I have yet to see any different looking thugs, other than the first level boss now appearing, with 1/20 of the health she had when we first fought. When you die, you have the option of continuing the game, but it takes you right back to the beginning of the level. That means I have to clear the same names, the same faces, the same recycled enemies once again. That sucks.

The classic take on grabbing two enemies at once for the meeting of the minds. It's a shame it's so difficult to get off on a consistent basis.

I’ve yet to fight a villain from the Marvel Universe other than a 10 second encounter with Doppelganger, who’s barely had any impact in the comic world, and that’s it. I have not even seen where the super hero assistance icons are. Hell, finding health replenishment is next to impossible as well, as they rarely drop off enemies when you need them, and rarely pop up in the background as you advance. This game is just brutal.

So I finally get past the point where I had to continue. I get to the boss and….it’s a fat guy with a blackjack and a tattoo. I seem to remember Marvel Superheroes and villains making appearances in this game. Maybe I was playing Spider Man & The X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge? But seriously, this is getting beyond the point of monotony. So I beat him, and what, two more?! Come on! I’m seriously considering giving up right here. So as soon as I type that, I get knocked down, and the most magical thing happened….CLOAK AND DAGGER APPEAR! So I’ll give this a little more time before dismissing the rest of the game.

Where the heck are all the super villains? Why am I constantly fighting no named baddies in place of villains from the comic series?

The further I play, the more I lose sight of why I loved this game as much as I did. It looks decent still, the music is definitely the show stealer, and the comic book story board scenes look really well done. But this is becoming borderline painful. After an annoying boss battle between Shriek and Doppelganger (two nobodies in the Marvel Universe) I can choose between continuing as Spider Man, or pick Venom. At this point, I totally forgot that Venom was available later in the game. I’m going to give him a chance and see how things develop.

Venom is as fast as Spider Man with stronger attacks. But this is the same exact thing. Same thugs, same cheap tactics. I found a Secret Room by bashing buttons near an ATM. Luckily you can win 1-ups in these rooms, which go a long way to helping you kill even more recycled enemies. So I finally reach the end of the stage. Who’s the boss, you ask?

Yeah. Forget this.

I really must have had some thick skin as a kid. I some how tuned out all of the repetition, all the recycled garbage, all of the painfully generic enemies and called this game awesome. Sure, the music is excellent, but I’d rather just download music rips of the game listen to it while I slam my bedroom door against my head for five minutes straight. Maximum Carnage is not worth the time investing if you’ve never played the game, and it’s not even worth anymore of my time to find actual super villains or heroes that people actually care about. Although it’s still the best LJN game I’ve played by far, that doesn’t really say much. It’s actually quite depressing to come back to a game I so fondly loved, and see how many glaring faults it really had.

Vemon secretly wishes he was shouting "GARBAGE!"

Rating Now: 4.4