Review #604: 64 Memories - ClayFighters 63 1/3

 Even they knew they were a few megabits short.

Part 1: The Flashback
  I think that we might've rented the game once or twice before buying it, but I'm not too sure. Regardless, it was one of the earlier games I got. I remember enjoying the game and its look and characters, at first, but by the time I was outgrowing the console I thought it was one of the weaker fighting games I owned.
 Which doesn't mean much considering I used to ADORE fighting games, but whatever. I had a few good times with my father and a couple of friends playing this one.

Part 2: The Review
 The third installment in the short lived ClayFighter series of fighting games, 63 1/3 was their first jump into the fifth generation of videogame consoles.  It's a simple fighting game with ridiculously good graphics that's more eye candy than anything else.

 The game is as simple as you can get, upon turning on the console you can only select Game Start or options. There are no extra modes, like time attack, just Arcade VS and VS Player. The character roster is made up of 9 characters and 3 bonus characters which you can access with codes. If it's worth anything to you, 16-bit heroes Boogerman and Earthworm Jim are playable characters. Beating the game on easy earns you an encouragement to try harder difficulties, and these harder difficulties only reward you with text endings. Lame.

 The game's most noteworthy feature is its graphics. Character sprites were made from clay figures, and they look fantastic. I've never been a fan of digitalized sprites, being more of a pixel-purist, but these sprites look fantastic, Mortal Kombat wishes it looked this good. That said, a few animations could've used more frames. While fights take place on a 2-D plane, you can move on the Z-axis with the R and L buttons, which doesn't work as a sidestep, but you can use it to line up your enemy against a window or a door so that your next hit is a stage-transition. Yes, stage-transitions are a thing, and you could move from one end of Clayfighter's world to the other, since stages are interconnected in various ways, heck, some feature transitions to more than a single place, depending on where you enemy lands. I'd lie if I said that how the game handled stage transitions wasn't incredibly cool.

 Sadly. aesthetics are the only thing worth writing about ClayFighters 63 1/3. You have six attack buttons(A, B and the C-buttons), but controls are very unresponsive. It feels as if some inputs are 'queued up', so hopefully you are not much of a masher.  That said, I think you can have a bit of casual fun with the game as long as you don't take it too seriously. You've got your Special attacks and even energy-gauge consuming Super moves. As a whole, the game is about as good as the upper echelons of the less than average Street Fighter clones.

 The poor reputation ClayFighter games have is well deserved, absolutely, but I'm willing to give 63 1/3 a pass because you can get it for fairly cheap and the game is worth a look if only to see how good claymation sprites can be.
4.0 out of 10