Spider-Man and Venom: Seperation Anxiety

Spider-Man and Venom: Separation Anxiety is a 1995 side-scrolling beat 'em up video game developed by Software Creations and published by Acclaim Entertainment for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and Super NES and then ported to PC. It is the direct sequel to Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage (also developed by Software Creations). One or two players team up as Spider-Man and Venom to defeat the evil symbiote Carnage. The game boasts a large number of thugs that the player has to defeat: a heavily armed Jury and Venom's symbiote children. There is also cameo assistance from Captain America, Ghost Rider, Hawkeye and Daredevil.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) There are a lot of moves in the game that knock you down. This can get tedious at times.
 * 2) The sprites are watered down. In the first game, they looked fine! Why not keep the sprites from the original?
 * 3) Spider-Man's standing posture makes him look like a football goalkeeper.
 * 4) The combat system suffers from the same watering-down issue as the sprites.
 * 5) Although decent-sounding, the music can get repetitive at times.
 * 6) *Worst of all, the soundtrack on the PC port is terrible.
 * 7) The game was ported to PC and lost its two player component, the only good part about the game.
 * 8) The assist system also got watered down, only featuring Captain America, Ghost Rider, Hawkeye and Daredevil, while the first game featured Captain America, Black Cat, Iron Fist, Cloak and Dagger, Deathlok, Morbius and Firestar.
 * 9) No continues, even though there is a password feature.

Good Qualities

 * 1) It has a two-player mode (only for the SNES and Genesis versions).
 * 2) There's a large variety of moves.
 * 3) As the music can get repetitive at times, it can be very catchy, mostly the SNES port.
 * 4) The character animation improves over Maximum Carnage.
 * 5) It's still not as bad as Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge.

Reception
Reviewing the Genesis version, Electronic Gaming Monthly 's "review crew" unanimously agreed that the game "isn't much fun", particularly finding fault in the repetitive fights with the same enemies and the cheap combat, with its constant flow of unavoidable hits.

A reviewer for Next Generation panned the PC port, calling it "an arcade bash-fest with little in the way of the intricacy and depth possible in a PC game." While noting that it was an extremely accurate port, he rated it lower than the Super NES and Genesis versions due to its poor value-for-money; he pointed out that a new Super NES or Genesis and a number of arcade-style beat-'em-ups for those systems could all be picked up for cheap.

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