Clayfighter 63 1/3 Review - Nintendo 64

Originally entitled Clayfighter 3 and intended for Matsushita's M2 console, the planned successor to the 3DO. Interplay decided to jump ship and port the game over to the Playstation and the Nintendo 64 when it became obvious that that the M2 wasn’t going make it to stores. For reasons unknown, the playstation version was quietly cancelled, leaving just the development of the N64 version, which shipped in ninety-seven. For all intents and purposes Clayfighter 63 1/3 is the remnants of that original M2 project, trying to mold together as best it can, is the game's foundation solid, or did it require a little longer in the Kiln? Clayfighter 63 1/3 runs the standard fare of fighting games with an uninteresting story involving Dr. Kiln’s attempt to take over the world with his evil experiments, aided and abetted by his cohorts, some of which share similar ambitions. Bad Mr. Frosty, a reformed character, is out to stop him with the help of various oddball characters, including, rather bizarrely, Earthworm Jim, who is apparently vacationing in the area as an lame excuse to add a character known to the masses. It’s silly and pointless, but who’s really playing a fighting game for its story anyway. You can change the control button layout and difficulty setting, but otherwise the options are effectively non-existent. In game characters number nine initial and twelve in total, making the selection pretty standard fare. three additional characters are unlocked by completing the game on higher difficulty levels, however a lack of any kind of save feature, either via battery-backup or the Controller pak will leave you wondering why Interplay decided to lock them away, forcing players to either unlock them each time, or use built in cheat codes. Why lock them away without the ability to save data, it’s totally nonsensical. The game itself has one mode, a basic arcade mode, which is divided into six random battles against the computer ending in the boss fight with Dr. Kiln. You can also play against a friend in verses battles, why you’d want to play a friend on this when there are much better games to play is another matter. Each fight consists of one long round with a two life-bar system similar to the one used in Killer Instinct; whoever drains both bars wins the fight. This can lead to battles becoming rather one-sided, particularly if there is a large discrepancy between the opponents in skill level. Mentioning Killer Instinct is hardly surprising, because for better or worse, the Clayfighter series has always borrowed and outright stolen elements from other games in the genre and 63 1/3 is no exception. Every control system is stolen from one game franchise or another, from super moves aping those of Street Fighter, the fatalities of Mortal Kombat and, above everything else the combo system of Killer Instinct. And once you learn this last part, the game simply turns into waiting for an opening to let loose a combo. While you can attempt combos in the same way as Street Fighter, including pulling of various super moves of varying effectiveness, it is the Killer Instinct combo system knock off that gives the best results. All it mostly requires is a charged or jump-in attack followed by a middle powered punch or kick and then rotating the stick from forward to down, repeat ad nauseam. Using this knowledge against the hapless computer leads to some very easy victories. Against another human, it just degenerates into both players watching for an opening and attempting to pull of a combo, it quickly becomes boring. Each character can also perform a finishing combo when the opponent is in the red, these are purely for show and are astonishingly easy to pull off, requiring one motion inputted in a normal combo for a 100+ hit attack. You can also pull of claytatilies after defeating your opponent, none of which are pulled of with any kind of aplomb. The game’s A.I. is laughable to poor, seemingly intent on either blocking or repeatable jumping away, leaving you half the time trying to just get close enough to your opponent. to hit them. On the harder difficult settings this gets even more prevalent to the point were you can spam the LP button and watch the enemy just block even though you attacks are not even close to hitting them. Occasionally the computer will actually try to put up a fight and may even pull of a combo, only to revert back to idiocy again. In the end Clayfighter 63 1/3 just isn’t very fun or engaging to play, most of the game’s mechanics are likely to remind players of the much better games better that it's ripping-off, and make them wonder why they aren’t playing them instead. The animation for the game was provided by Danger Productions, a company whose must notable work was the stop motion series Bump in the Night. Here the animation is, for lack of a better word, choppy; it is also fairly bland and lacks any distinct character. You also have to wait for animations to run their course, buffering is pretty much out of the equation here. Added to this is the low resolution that the character sprites have been added in, making them blurry and ill-defined, even by the Nintendo 64 standards. The characters all hail from stereotype city of the kind that was prevalent in 1930’s and 40’s animation, stereotypes that we should have graduated from years ago. If the idea of a buck-toothed Chinese man speaking in broken English sounds appealing to you, or the prospect of Boogerman - another Interplay guest character added to the game - farting while claiming that "you can almost taste it" draws you to the game, then perhaps you should getting a better kind of humor. The backgrounds fair a little better, rendered in full 3D, but even here they have a tendency to clash with the 2D characters and most are outright void of anything interesting to look at, or are so uniform in their coloration that there are just rather bland. You can be bumped from one to another via doors or the like, but this is effectively little more than just a change of scenery. The camera is also not very reliable, with it getting stuck behind a piece of the foreground every so often, especially when you’re attempting combos, at these times it can completely block a character from view, which is annoying and makes actually controlling the game a chore. One part of the audio that does excel is the voice work, with renowned animation voice actors like Jim Cummings, Dan Castelaneta, Rob Paulsen and Frank Welker providing their collective vocal talent to the proceedings. Topping of the cast is wrestling announcer Michael Buffer, commentating in the background and starting the fights of with a slightly modified version of his famous catchphrase. However having some of the best people of the industry won’t help a script based on lame one-liners that quickly get repeated beyond a joke, and becomes tiresome as a result. The Clayfighter series has its infamous reputation for a reason and with its woeful mechanics; choppy animation, bland backgrounds, moronic A.I. an obstinate camera and irresponsive controls mean that Clayfighter 63 1/3 is no exception to that rule. It is a bad excuse for a fighting game and should be avoided; because unless you have a thing for its brand of toilet humor, there is little to entertain a player here. It’s not so much a case of whether it needed longer in the Kiln, but whether it should have been smashed into oblivion when it was a mere malleable piece of clay.