Insert Coin — Reviewing: ‘Marvel: MaXimum Collection’ From Limited Run Games

Welcome to the table,

I recently had the opportunity to play the new Marvel MaXimum Collection, from Limited Run Games, in conjunction with Marvel Games and Konami Digital Entertainment. It was the most fun I have had at home on a weekend in a while. Let’s get into it!

My pals over at LR Games sent me an early access code. As I was looking through what was available in this collection, I knew I had to find a friend to game with who was going to not only be fun to hang out with, win or lose, but also who was not a gamer who would be locked into a “get good” mindset.

For me, the joy of playing classic arcade or console games, especially ones with multiplayer options, is the conversation and company you get to enjoy from the people you play with. Seeing that the classic X-Men: The Arcade Game was part of this offering had me nothing short of X-static with X-citement. Pardon the puns. We made a ton of them playing.

The moment I knew we would have a chance to clear a day to just hang out and play, I knew I had to select my player two from a limited lineup of people I actually know I can spend more than a few hours with. It had to be someone who would be fun to be around, even if the prospect of being frustrated at losing to digital delinquents is on the table.

For this particular outing, I selected my wife’s mom, an old-school X-Men fan who was reading floppies from the long boxes back in the 1980s and early 1990s. She’s also a fan of the cartoon and has been since its launch back when I was a kid. In truth, she’s a really good hang in just about any environment and one of those people I actually want to be around.

We grabbed lunch, I cracked a bottle of wine, and we settled in to see what was in store for us as we fired up the game on my PS5.

The first thing we both wanted to play was X-Men: The Arcade Game, so that was the first thing we loaded up.

As the intro screens began to take us through the setup story, we both marveled (pardon the pun, we made a lot of them) at the graphics. It’s not that they were something you would find in a triple-A title or something heavily polished; they were clearly pulled right from the original arcade cabinet, but there was something more, a richness, a care put into it.

The experience felt authentic but elevated, and this was just the opening crawl.

She picked Wolverine, I selected Colossus, and we got to work knocking down flickering foes as they came at us from all sides of the screen. The controls handled like a dream. Where I have only experienced “stick drift” on the arcade machines that have been abused for years and years, the way the controls translate to the PS5 DualSense controllers was remarkably smooth and bug-free.

Hitting the touch pad gave you more credits, so when you eventually got destroyed by falling off the map (something we learned we could do in certain stages) or smashed by the Blob (the only boss that really wrecked us), we could pop back up and keep playing worry-free.

As you play through the various stages, you are constantly being assaulted by slightly larger than human sentinels and guys with armor and canons twice as long as they were tall. The colorways changed, but for the most part, there was not a ton of variety in the foes, and yet we totally were there for it.

The boss lineup was a who’s who of the X-Men’s most notorious villains, including Pyro, The Blob, Wendigo, The White Queen, Nimrod, Juggernaut, Living Monolith, Mystique, and Magneto.

Each fight felt fun and fresh, even when you have to fight them all in a big comic book brawl at the end. Magneto even says “Welcome… to die!!!” and yes, we cracked up when he said it.

Also, the White Queen has this awful laugh. It was worse than any actual attack we had to deal with, and Mystique’s fight felt like an actual fun twist before having to actually face off against the “Master of Magnetism” himself.

In total, trying to count how many credits we “spent,” at fifty cents per play, we would have probably put around twenty three bucks into a machine to get as far as we did.  We beat the game at least once and made it to The Blob for a second time.

The wild thing is this was a truly enjoyable way to spend the afternoon. The game itself is so much more than just X-Men: The Arcade Game. In addition, the collection has Captain America and The Avengers, playable in Arcade, MEGA, and 8-bit. We tried our hand at Hawkeye and Vision for about half an hour before we jumped over to Spider-Man/Venom: Maximum Carnage for a while.

We still have Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety, Spider-Man/X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge, and the 8-bit Silver Surfer game that I have watched and played all the way through, but never had a chance to actually play myself.

The collection is also packed with cool little quality-of-life features, like being able to activate cheats for infinite lives, checking out some really cool archive boxes and promotional art, and the ability change your game borders to fit whatever vibe you are playing with.

There is even a really cool display option that allows you to play with modern pixels or a CRT filter for that super Saturday morning experience.

As a champion of physical media, this is the kind of collection that really speaks to me. It provides an experience that is pick up and play enough to feel unburdened by the sometimes daunting weight of the sandbox titans that I can get lost in. It also provides an experience that can fill an hour or a whole day, depending on how much time you have to hang out with your favorite people or go solo adventuring on your own.

Until next time, this would make an epic gift for the X-Men, Marvel, or Arcade fan in your life. I know we had a ton of fun playing its set off a chain of events where I think much more intentional console time is soon to come!