Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
479A playthrough of Acclaim's 1995 license-based beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo, Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety.
Played through as Spider-Man.
Separation Anxiety is the follow-up to the 1994 game Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage (https://youtu.be/E4Y18_lt9_M ). Once again, you take on the role of Spider-Man or Venom in the fight against Carnage, web-slinging and melee combo-ing your way through hordes of thugs.
Maximum Carnage was a pretty good game. It was no Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but it had a good vibe and fair bit of craftsmanship behind it. Separation Anxiety makes an attempt to follow the same formula, but the repetitive and shallow gameplay and the near total lack of story make it feel like a Dollar Store imitation of its predecessor.
The intro alone should give you a good idea of what to expect, with its bright orange wall of all-caps text, and in the Bart vs. the Space Mutants font, no less!
The controls are fiddly and slow to respond, and the enemies are all irritatingly eager to take advantage. Their patterns are simple, and there aren't many types of enemies to worry about - 99% of the time, you'll be fighting swarms of guys in hazmat suits. Some of them punch, some of them throw things, and the only real challenge comes from when they try to corner trap you, which becomes a constant occurrence by about 3/4 of the way through the game.
To counteract the cheap AI, you can collect icons that will summon a superhero friend (Captain America, Hawkeye, Daredevil, or Ghost Rider) for a full-screen attack that will clear out regular enemies and do major damage to the bosses. You get a lot of these icons over the course of the game, but you're best off saving them for the gauntlet of padding that awaits in the last couple of stages. Those last few areas are a slog thanks to the sheer number of enemies the game tosses at you, and the whole package outstays its welcome by a fair margin.
The graphics are less varied and much more generically styled than they were in Maximum Carnage, though they're still reasonably nice looking. (Spider-Man's walking animation always makes me think of the grabby-hands molester guy from Alf on the Master System. Anyone else see the resemblance?) That title theme is cool, too - it sounds like lo-fi 90s dance music - even though the rest the tunes just tend to drone on in the background.
I really enjoyed Maximum Carnage, but I just couldn't get into Separation Anxiety. It's not the worst SNES beat 'em up, but it's tedious and it drags on for way too long. If it's a license-based beat 'em up that you want, the SNES had some great ones. I'd recommend playing one of those instead.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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