Hands-On at PAX East

Within minutes at PAX East, I was swapping between the SNES and Genesis versions of Maximum Carnage, hearing the soundtrack shift and watching the palettes change. That quick A/B test sells what Limited Run Games is going for with the Marvel MaXimum Collection: faithful preservation wrapped in flexible, modern conveniences.

This anthology corrals a who’s who of punchy, side-scrolling Marvel gems. You get X-Men: The Arcade Game, Captain America and The Avengers, Spider-Man/Venom: Maximum Carnage, Separation Anxiety, Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge, and Silver Surfer, all presented in their original forms, with multiple platform versions represented where history demands it. For anyone who grew up quarter-feeding X-Men or renting battered carts on weekends, it’s a time capsule you can actually live in.

Arcade Staples, Preserved

Emulation feels tight. Shield throws in Captain America snap off the button press, and swinging across New York in Maximum Carnage carries the rubbery bounce you remember. Nothing about the input timing felt mushy or compromised during my demo. Visuals land where they should, too, with bright, arcade-y neons and the SNES’s 32k-ish color vibes letting the original sprite work breathe instead of burying it under modern filters.

X-Men: The Arcade Game remains the showpiece. Its legend as a “Mount Rushmore” arcade classic still rings out in barcades across the country, and it shines here as the marquee cabinet you’d drag your friends to first. But the real win is access. Not every Marvel release from that era stayed easy to find, and some never hit arcades at all. Putting them under one roof matters, especially when you can compare versions without juggling hardware, adapters, or spotty YouTube compression.

I appreciated the nerdy details. Swapping between SNES and Genesis flavors of Maximum Carnage, you can hear the distinct character of each system’s audio and spot subtle color differences. That kind of side-by-side is usually a rabbit hole of cables and capture cards. Here, it’s a menu away. “This is the museum treatment these games deserve,” I found myself muttering more than once.

Options That Respect Your Time

Preservation doesn’t stop at pixels. The collection remembers that early ’90s design often asked you to pay—either in quarters or patience. Difficulty spikes were a feature, not a bug. Rather than smoothing those edges, MaXimum keeps the original behavior intact and gives you ethical cheats to deal with it: toggle the built-in codes, flip on unlimited credits where the arcade versions allow, and use a welcome rewind to undo a cheap hit.

That approach walks a smart line. Purists can play it straight and embrace the brawler grind. Everyone else can sample the highs, see the endings, and still understand how these games were tuned without bouncing off the brick walls. It’s respectful to the source and realistic about how we play now.

Control responsiveness matched the intent. “Snappy and responsive” isn’t just a box to tick—here it’s the difference between a nostalgic tour and a headache. From my time across the lineup, hits landed clean, jumps behaved, and there was no hint of added latency muddying the action.

Presentation and Extras

Limited Run’s curation streak continues. The front-end is clean, the game pages are informative, and the vibe aims for archival rather than novelty pack. A trove of digital artwork—design docs, concept art, and other production ephemera—rounds out the package. It’s not an afterthought; it’s the connective tissue that turns a bundle into what feels like a “museum-caliber” compilation.

Silver Surfer, the cult lightning rod, benefits the most from this framing. Seen in context, its sharp edges feel less like a punishment and more like a snapshot of how home releases chased longevity. Having the tools to push past its roughest patches makes revisiting it more curiosity than chore.

The Online Wildcard

Local co-op support looks promising, including six-player mayhem for X-Men where platforms allow. That’s table stakes for a collection like this. Online is the bigger question. The team is using rollback netcode, which can be great for two-player sessions but grows trickier as headcounts rise. I didn’t get to test online during my demo, and older ROMs can react unpredictably once you stitch netcode into the mix. Consider me cautiously optimistic for two players and curious to see how stability holds with four or more.

Still, the offline package already lands where it needs to. These games feel right, look right, and are framed with care. If the online holds up—and I hope it does—MaXimum could become the definitive way to revisit Marvel’s scrappiest ’90s brawlers.

Limited Run Games has a reputation for getting this stuff right, and early signs suggest they’ve done it again. Marvel MaXimum Collection is out now on PC and consoles, and for anyone who grew up on CRT glare and sticky arcade floors, it’s a welcome return to form—complete with the tools to enjoy it on your terms.