(This is the 100th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I've played 100 games as part of this challenge now! Shame that the milestone was achieved with this game in particular, but also kind of fitting as one big theme of the challenge so far has been me finding out that Spider-Man games were shockingly bad for many, many years, so why not reach the 100 mark with another one of those?
Well, if there is another silver lining to that, it's that hey, you know what? Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is the best of the 8 (!) Spider-Man games I've played between 1990 and 1994. That says much more about the other seven than it does about this game, but it's worth acknowledging nonetheless.
This beat 'em up game released on September 16, 1994 to be exact, was developed by Software Creations (who developed the other, actually functional, Spider-Man game in 1992) and published by Acclaim Entertainment / LJN, who retro fans need no introducing to. It feels like yet another game where the publisher went "fuck it, do what you want with the license, here are 8 bucks", and the developers went "Ok, we'll actually try".
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The plot is apparently the first ever for a Spider-Man game to be picked straight out of an actual comic book story. It's told in a comic book style as well, which is a cost-efficient and fitting way to do things for a Spider-Man game. Finally a Spider-Man game that picks the easy and better path in that sense.
While there is more emphasis on the plot here than for most non-RPGs of the time, the problem here is that the storytelling is a jumbled mess at times because there are so many characters involved and just appear seemingly out of nowhere, so it is very easy to get confused by what is going on. The simple version of it is that Eddie Brock is released out of jail, and the Venom symbiote bonds to his former cellmate Cletus Kasady, who turns into supervillain Carnage. Venom and Spider-Man begrudgingly work together to defeat him whilst Carnage builds a team of villains.
For gameplay, this translates to fighting the same 5 or 6 types of enemies through well over a dozen stages and fighting the villains themselves about a dozen times overall as well. The pacing is pretty weird and clearly a lack of budget and/or time limited enemy variety so much that the devs just re-used the same events many times to make each encounter feel less and less special.
Overall, I think comic book fans who are more aware of all the characters will easier understand what's going on and get a little more enjoyment out of this, and I'm glad that comic book storytelling was used here, but it's not going to be the driving force to keep you playing, if gameplay doesn't do it for you.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
If you play this and think "man, controls are not great", than boy do I have something to show you with all the other Spider-Man games that preceded this one. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage's gameplay controls OK actually, but the issue is that enemy attack patterns are hard to discern in many ways, which will lead to you getting hit a ton, even though you are in the midst of attacking an enemy that for most of the time staggers enemies (meaning they don't attack back), until it somehow doesn't.
To explain it a bit further, this is a beat 'em up game in the same vein of Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Final Fight. You walk down alleyways and can progress as you beat up enemies that show up continuously, until you reach the end of a stage and face a boss. You control Spider-Man, but the game lets you pick between him and Venom from time to time as well, which is pointless since their moveset is pretty much identical.
You hit enemies with punches for the most part, but you can also tie them up with your webs, use your webs to jump up and kick them in the air, jump & kick and pull them towards you with your webs to punch and throw them. If you time it right, you can sit inbetween two enemies and pull them towards each other and make their hands bang together, which is the highlight of this combat system.
There are stages where you have to dodge bombs and projectiles from above by swinging from one building to another and then back, but mainly it's the classic beat 'em up gameplay here.
Enemies are more or less aggressive depending on the color of their clothes, which indicates toughness, and enemy types do have their own attacks, but as mentioned, there are just very few of them in this game. It's so limited that they actually use a specific enemy type as a boss upon first introduction, before throwing them into the normal enemy pool in the next stages.
Then you have the fights against the main villain group, where you face up to 4 of them in one boss rush-type sequence. This is where the gameplay falls apart, as you can't reliable hit and dodge them, and their health pools make the fight last for way too long. The idea is to hit Carnage once or twice and move away, because he will not be staggered and just rush towards you. Then you gotta watch out to not dodge into Shriek's path, because she will just horizontally shoot her sonic energy blasts, which covers way more space than it appears she would. Then you punch her a couple times, at which point she teleports to another area on the screen, but not before leaving a vertical energy blast in her stead, which is going to hit you 100% of the time unless you punch just enough times to tread backwards before she teleports. Punching one too few times however will open you up to her horizontal blast, so it's a tediously tight game of do enough but not too much until she is disposed of, at which point you can focus on the others. You do this, as I said, 10+ times, which is not very creative nor fun.
To help you out a little bit, you can pick up power ups that let you spawn your allies, who will do a special attack that knocks out all bosses on screen and takes just a little bit of their health, or that kills all normal enemies on screen. It's OK but not too useful.
Overall, the gameplay works but is too unfair and repetitive to be considered fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting besides grunts. Sound design is a pretty basic SNES soundboard affair, while the rock soundtrack itself is actually pretty good. Not too many tracks in it, and I can't say it's all that unique, but you'll be OK with listening to it at minimum.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
The graphical quality is average for an SNES title. It stands out though for the fact that many locations look and are identical/repeated, enemy variety is low and overall, visual diversity is just too little. Unlike all other Spider-Man games from its time, Spider-Man doesn't have horrendous posture though, which is at least something.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10
Feels like a Spider-Man game thanks to the comic book storytelling and the multitude of characters appearing, but doesn't feel like a Spider-Man game because all the normal enemies are just random dudes and gals hitting you with frying pans and ... their hair.
CONTENT | 3/10
You will play this game for 3-8 hours depending on your skill level, if you want to beat it. For that run time, the game offers you fairly little. The moveset is very limited, enemies are always the same, levels look similar, there are no surprises the game really ever has in store for you in its gameplay, and the frustration levels here are very high anyway. With all these points combined, you'll see everything the game has to offer in an hour and probably not want to spend more than that anyway.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
Alleyway, rooftops, the insides of bland looking buildings. That's what you'll get in terms of locations for the majority of this game. In almost all of them, you will be doing the same thing as well. Move from side to side (sometimes even back the way you came???), punch a bunch of bad guys, fight bosses that are the normal enemies, just tougher and move on with the story. Very bland.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 3/10
The game doesn't do anything do differentiate itself from prior beat 'em up games. It just uses that formula to make a functional, not terrible video game. The most (read: only) inspired part about this game is the comic book storytelling, but that loses its novelty after a while once you realize the story is not particularly well told despite the method they chose fitting the titular main character very well.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
You can choose Spider-Man or Venom as part of an illusion of choice for some levels. In reality, the only replayable part about the game is the high score system, in that you can try to beat your previous one.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 43/100
So yeah, the best Spider-Man game of the early 90s by far, but only because the other ones are so much worse. This game doesn't do so much wrong, it just does very little right. If you want to play a Spider-Man game, play the modern ones or those from the early 2000s, and if you want to play a beat 'em up, play Streets of Rage or Final Fight. The devs clearly had some passion for this game, which is nice, but an LJN-led (Spider-Man) game being only pretty bad is probably the best we got.
I've played 100 games as part of this challenge now! Shame that the milestone was achieved with this game in particular, but also kind of fitting as one big theme of the challenge so far has been me finding out that Spider-Man games were shockingly bad for many, many years, so why not reach the 100 mark with another one of those?
Well, if there is another silver lining to that, it's that hey, you know what? Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is the best of the 8 (!) Spider-Man games I've played between 1990 and 1994. That says much more about the other seven than it does about this game, but it's worth acknowledging nonetheless.
This beat 'em up game released on September 16, 1994 to be exact, was developed by Software Creations (who developed the other, actually functional, Spider-Man game in 1992) and published by Acclaim Entertainment / LJN, who retro fans need no introducing to. It feels like yet another game where the publisher went "fuck it, do what you want with the license, here are 8 bucks", and the developers went "Ok, we'll actually try".
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The plot is apparently the first ever for a Spider-Man game to be picked straight out of an actual comic book story. It's told in a comic book style as well, which is a cost-efficient and fitting way to do things for a Spider-Man game. Finally a Spider-Man game that picks the easy and better path in that sense.
While there is more emphasis on the plot here than for most non-RPGs of the time, the problem here is that the storytelling is a jumbled mess at times because there are so many characters involved and just appear seemingly out of nowhere, so it is very easy to get confused by what is going on. The simple version of it is that Eddie Brock is released out of jail, and the Venom symbiote bonds to his former cellmate Cletus Kasady, who turns into supervillain Carnage. Venom and Spider-Man begrudgingly work together to defeat him whilst Carnage builds a team of villains.
For gameplay, this translates to fighting the same 5 or 6 types of enemies through well over a dozen stages and fighting the villains themselves about a dozen times overall as well. The pacing is pretty weird and clearly a lack of budget and/or time limited enemy variety so much that the devs just re-used the same events many times to make each encounter feel less and less special.
Overall, I think comic book fans who are more aware of all the characters will easier understand what's going on and get a little more enjoyment out of this, and I'm glad that comic book storytelling was used here, but it's not going to be the driving force to keep you playing, if gameplay doesn't do it for you.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
If you play this and think "man, controls are not great", than boy do I have something to show you with all the other Spider-Man games that preceded this one. Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage's gameplay controls OK actually, but the issue is that enemy attack patterns are hard to discern in many ways, which will lead to you getting hit a ton, even though you are in the midst of attacking an enemy that for most of the time staggers enemies (meaning they don't attack back), until it somehow doesn't.
To explain it a bit further, this is a beat 'em up game in the same vein of Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Final Fight. You walk down alleyways and can progress as you beat up enemies that show up continuously, until you reach the end of a stage and face a boss. You control Spider-Man, but the game lets you pick between him and Venom from time to time as well, which is pointless since their moveset is pretty much identical.
You hit enemies with punches for the most part, but you can also tie them up with your webs, use your webs to jump up and kick them in the air, jump & kick and pull them towards you with your webs to punch and throw them. If you time it right, you can sit inbetween two enemies and pull them towards each other and make their hands bang together, which is the highlight of this combat system.
There are stages where you have to dodge bombs and projectiles from above by swinging from one building to another and then back, but mainly it's the classic beat 'em up gameplay here.
Enemies are more or less aggressive depending on the color of their clothes, which indicates toughness, and enemy types do have their own attacks, but as mentioned, there are just very few of them in this game. It's so limited that they actually use a specific enemy type as a boss upon first introduction, before throwing them into the normal enemy pool in the next stages.
Then you have the fights against the main villain group, where you face up to 4 of them in one boss rush-type sequence. This is where the gameplay falls apart, as you can't reliable hit and dodge them, and their health pools make the fight last for way too long. The idea is to hit Carnage once or twice and move away, because he will not be staggered and just rush towards you. Then you gotta watch out to not dodge into Shriek's path, because she will just horizontally shoot her sonic energy blasts, which covers way more space than it appears she would. Then you punch her a couple times, at which point she teleports to another area on the screen, but not before leaving a vertical energy blast in her stead, which is going to hit you 100% of the time unless you punch just enough times to tread backwards before she teleports. Punching one too few times however will open you up to her horizontal blast, so it's a tediously tight game of do enough but not too much until she is disposed of, at which point you can focus on the others. You do this, as I said, 10+ times, which is not very creative nor fun.
To help you out a little bit, you can pick up power ups that let you spawn your allies, who will do a special attack that knocks out all bosses on screen and takes just a little bit of their health, or that kills all normal enemies on screen. It's OK but not too useful.
Overall, the gameplay works but is too unfair and repetitive to be considered fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
No voice acting besides grunts. Sound design is a pretty basic SNES soundboard affair, while the rock soundtrack itself is actually pretty good. Not too many tracks in it, and I can't say it's all that unique, but you'll be OK with listening to it at minimum.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
The graphical quality is average for an SNES title. It stands out though for the fact that many locations look and are identical/repeated, enemy variety is low and overall, visual diversity is just too little. Unlike all other Spider-Man games from its time, Spider-Man doesn't have horrendous posture though, which is at least something.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 5/10
Feels like a Spider-Man game thanks to the comic book storytelling and the multitude of characters appearing, but doesn't feel like a Spider-Man game because all the normal enemies are just random dudes and gals hitting you with frying pans and ... their hair.
CONTENT | 3/10
You will play this game for 3-8 hours depending on your skill level, if you want to beat it. For that run time, the game offers you fairly little. The moveset is very limited, enemies are always the same, levels look similar, there are no surprises the game really ever has in store for you in its gameplay, and the frustration levels here are very high anyway. With all these points combined, you'll see everything the game has to offer in an hour and probably not want to spend more than that anyway.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 3/10
Alleyway, rooftops, the insides of bland looking buildings. That's what you'll get in terms of locations for the majority of this game. In almost all of them, you will be doing the same thing as well. Move from side to side (sometimes even back the way you came???), punch a bunch of bad guys, fight bosses that are the normal enemies, just tougher and move on with the story. Very bland.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 3/10
The game doesn't do anything do differentiate itself from prior beat 'em up games. It just uses that formula to make a functional, not terrible video game. The most (read: only) inspired part about this game is the comic book storytelling, but that loses its novelty after a while once you realize the story is not particularly well told despite the method they chose fitting the titular main character very well.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
You can choose Spider-Man or Venom as part of an illusion of choice for some levels. In reality, the only replayable part about the game is the high score system, in that you can try to beat your previous one.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 43/100
So yeah, the best Spider-Man game of the early 90s by far, but only because the other ones are so much worse. This game doesn't do so much wrong, it just does very little right. If you want to play a Spider-Man game, play the modern ones or those from the early 2000s, and if you want to play a beat 'em up, play Streets of Rage or Final Fight. The devs clearly had some passion for this game, which is nice, but an LJN-led (Spider-Man) game being only pretty bad is probably the best we got.