Whew! What an experience.
This is one of the premier beat em up games from the 1990s, known for its notorious difficulty as well as its adaptation of the Maximum Carnage storyline that ran for several months across all of the Spider-Man comics that were being published at the time. I recently sat down with the SEGA Genesis cartridge and streamed some gameplay as I re-experienced it on the Hyperkin RetroN 5 gaming console.
Gameplaywise, Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is one of those legendarily difficult games I remember playing when I was a teenager. Even back then, I simply didn't have the time to get as good as the game required you to be to complete it, and I'll be honest: without modern gaming conveniences like save states, I probably still wouldn't have been able to do it.
But, with the generous use of save states, I was able to beat it, and I can finally retire this game without it haunting me as one of the ones I couldn't beat.
This beat em up game is notoriously unforgiving. There are too many enemies, moving too fast, with too much health, who deal too much damage, whose attack durations are heavily tilted in their favor. This game isn't just difficult--it's a bully, continually shoving your face into the mud and gleefully feeding off your tears of frustration. Don't even get me started on the boss fights.
Still... it's addictive. There ARE points in the game where you stumble into a pattern or method to defeat a particular character or mob, and when that happens you feel like a damn genius badass. It makes you work, long and hard, to find them, but they do exist and do contribute to that feeling of getting better and progressing further.
Graphically, this game is well done. The sprites are well done iterations of the characters in the Maximum Carnage storyline, lifted straight out of the pages of the comics. The panels from the comic during the cut scenes look blocky and awkward compared to the original works, but that was SEGA and Nintendo working within the graphical limits of the day. My biggest issue is with the recycled design of the mob characters. I get why they're there, but goodness would I have liked to have seen more variation.
The sound design is... fine. I remember not being terribly impressed by it even back in the 90s, but again, they're working with the limits of the time. Carnage's loony laugh is unintentionally funny, and I find it weird that it's the only real piece of 'voice work' in the game. The melee effects, cut scene sounds, and music are all fine, nothing terribly exciting, but nothing to complain about. But I'm also not much of a sound guy, so maybe I'm not worth listening to here.
Overall, this is a great game to play if you're a Spider-Man fan, particularly if you were reading these comics in the 90s; if you like beat em ups; and if you like unforgivingly difficult games that want to bully you into submission. More casual types may play this for a little while, get bored or frustrated with the difficulty, and then walk away. It's well made, and looks good, but the overall experience might be trying for completionists.
SNES features more rich palettes for backgrounds and more color variety for enemies, and the addition of a THUDS and THOKS