Clay Fighter 63 1/3

Clay fighter 63 1/3 is the last in a series of not very good fighting games produced by Interplay. A company that decided that it would make a name for itself by producing a series of forgettable games with the hook that the games would be rendered in claymation (a.k.a. stop-motion photography).

I followed the development of this game for months before it came out. The screenshots and preview videos I saw made me salivate for the opportunity to play it. The stages looked amazing, the cartoonish characters had a variety of over-the-top special moves, and the game was voiced by such heavy hitters as Charles Adler, Jeff Bennet, Michael Buffer, Dan Castellaneta, Jim Cummings, Jess Harnell, Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulson, and Frank Welker.

Unfortunately, the game didn’t live up to the title that I had produced in my head. The game is a parody of fighting games, and incorporates a version of the combo system found in Killer Instinct. This basically means that you can string attacks together to create combos, which are appropriately violent. The fighters are clay (“hit ‘em, smack ‘em, they don’t care”) so they look predictably cartoony. There is a clown, a snow man, a disturbing portrayal of a Chinese chef, a bionic rabbit, Earthworm Jim, Boogerman, a token blob character, a shirtless Santa, and some more oddities. There were some other characters that were all over the previews, but didn’t make it in for one reason or another. Which led to a major problem, the game was incomplete.

The game had stages for the characters that were left out, the story had gaping holes in it since the characters had gone missing, the stages had nonfunctional objects that look like they should have done something, the hit detection was way off at times, the characters that were in the game moved and interacted with each other stiffly, etc. Lots more etc.

Some of these problems were fixed in the rental-only (and very rare) Sculptor’s Cut version of this game that fixed almost all of these problems, at the expense of the ‘insane combos’ (300+ hit finishing maneuvers). Unfortunately, since you couldn’t actually buy this version (the good version) what you’re left with is a slow, plodding, unfinished mess of a game.

One Response to “Clay Fighter 63 1/3”

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