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.