YMMV / Total Carnage

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The gag where Akhboob's "baby milk factory" is really a bio-weapons lab. During the first Gulf War, the coalition forces did bomb a baby milk factory, later claiming that they had intelligence showing that the factory was actually used for producing chemical weapons.
• Awesome Music: The music for Stage 1.
• Catharsis Factor: The game is hard, especially the bosses. Akhboob taunts your character and even the player, tortures you with an electric chair, is one of the hardest and longest final bosses of all time and has split himself into clones to escape you, which he will do if one clone escapes. But if you do catch him, you can take delicious payback in the final minigame, where you use an electric chair yourself. How does the game call your last objective? Fry the scumbag!
• Demonic Spiders: Robotic spiders start appearing in the second mission, are common and can easily kill you but can't easily be killed. There are even spider eggs that hatch if not collected beforehand.
• Game-Breaker: If you stick close to jets or the mutagen factory, your bombs will become an airstrike. This is incredibly useful to clear out enemies as well, and in the arcade version there is a Good Bad Bug that allows you to use it on the last phases of the final boss, making it much more manageable.
• Nintendo Hard: Per arcade standards. This is a LONG (hour-plus) arcade game (most arcade games only take 15-30 minutes tops, depending on genre) in which thousands of enemies, many of which can take hundreds or thousands of hits to kill (especially the bosses) all swarm you. Also, you die in one poke, and it doesn't help that your supermuscles merely make you a larger target. Worse, extra lives and powerups are harder to get the longer you play, and if you go far enough without continuing, your bombs will eventually not give you the standard invulnerability. There are some cheap ways to die, and you can lose all your lives at once if you get fried by the electric chair. Noted in this one-credit-clear longplay, as the player notes that it is "not a game that encourages 1-credit play, due to the fact that you get to keep your score when you continue" and buyins through many continues will get better scores.