Joe Rover

“Welcome to Die!”

Such a classic line from arcade games. You just got to love those mistranslated phrases. When I was but a lad, I always thought Magneto had named the island “Die.” It was the 90s. Games and shows, especially kid ones, always had weird or punny names, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch.

It was so cool to see the developers add it as the title to the achievement, along with a few others. I got a nice chuckled from it.

However, while it is nice to play some of those old-timey-dark-ages-age-of-the-dinosaurs Marvel games–I can’t tell you how many memories of playing the X-Men game at the arcade came back–there were definitely problems.

The first problem came from the Maximum Carnage game. I got to the alley fight (the one after the climbing level), but I couldn’t beat it because the boss was indestructible. I finally realized it was because I had the infinite health cheat on. I couldn’t finish the level because Spider-Man had to lose.

OK, so it was partly my fault, but the developers did put the option in the game. Thankfully, you can turn cheats off by saving the game, leaving, turning off the cheat, and reloading the game. (It works the same for turning cheats on mid-game.)

The other problem was during the X-Men arcade game. The background of the first and second levels merged together. I ended up having to start the game from scratch. Fortunately, it was only level one.

It was annoying, yet nostalgic. In the dark ages, there were many a times I had to pop the game cartridge out and blow on it to “fix the glitch.”

Also, the rewind feature doesn’t go back very far. But that doesn’t really matter.

Now that’s out of the way…

It was so much fun to play those old games again…especially now that I can actually get past the first level. What can I say, games back then were designed to eat up as many coins as possible.

The soundtracks were excellent. I kept jamming out to the music.

The games controlled fairly well; there were times that the character stopped moving for a moment (which was annoying when trying to dodge blasts from villains) or movements were awkward–I’m looking at you Captain America and the Avengers game. Also, the hit boxes…oof. I hate it when they can hit you, but you whiff over and over. And I almost forgot about how the bosses are able to wail on you. You can’t even get up before they start pounding you back into the ground.

I did like that I could pick the various versions of the game, like arcade or 8-bit. Also, the games were made a little bit more fair than originally, i.e. cheats, the rewind feature, and infinite coins.

The jury is still out on if I think it’s worth the almost $30. Maybe if they patched out some bugs. It is nice to play these games again (now DC just needs to release The Death and Return of Superman and the Superman arcade game).

MARVEL MaXimum Collection is available at many retailers, such as Playstation and Xbox.

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No time for jokes!

From April 1-30, my ebooks will be on sale for $0.99! That’s 16 short stories, anthologies, and novellas to choose from. 

So, stock up for the long summer ahead!