 My main goal with this channel project thing is always been to try and look at older games and see if they still hold up well today, or if they're just a product of their time. I try and avoid using the phrase quote-unquote at the time, because well, most of these videos are titled Is Such and Such Worth Playing Today, not Wasn't Such and Such Fun to Play 25 years ago, I don't think videos like that are all that useful. But having said all that, with a game like Clayfighter, you have to talk about the circumstances surrounding the game when it was made. The gaming industry was headlong into a one-on-one fighting game binge, with stuff like Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat achieving massive popularity. Many fighting games tried to compete with those, and many failed, but Clayfighter took a different approach. This game almost seems to mock the very idea of a fighting game, using clay models as fighters with exaggerated features, making this game look like an episode of Peewee's Playhouse. There's 8 playable characters and a boss. There's Bad Mr. Frosty, a snowman, Blue Suede, Goo, an Elvis impersonator, Bonker, a crazy clown, Helga, an opera singer, Icky-Bod Clay, a ghost with a pumpkin head, Taffy, who is actually made of Taffy, Tiny, a roided-up pro wrestler type, and Blob, a, uh, Blob of Clay. I guess they ran out of ideas. The boss is N Boss, which is meant to mock M Bison, and also be a play on words for N Boss. Just one glance at the characters and the fighting here should give you an idea of what this game is like. This isn't exactly killer instinct or Street Fighter 2 or even Mortal Kombat in terms of combat depth. Fighting is kept very simple here which is necessary due to the limited frame rate of the sprite animations. I'll give the game credit for making each character completely different, not just aesthetically but in how they play, but the combat here is still painfully simple and as a result it's easy to get bored with Clay Fighter pretty quickly with both the SNES and the Genesis port which came later. This game and this series for that matter is one of those gaming relics, a great achievement at the time, there's that phrase again, but it hasn't held up well in terms of playing it today because the novelty of a claymation fighting game is gone and dead and there's not enough substance behind the gameplay. You gotta give credit where it's due though, this game took over a year to develop. The characters were actually modeled with Clay and some characters like the Blob had over 70 different models that needed to be captured. Each model was photographed and digitized and what you see here is the result, it's pretty dang impressive visually. And in addition to that they managed to capture the goofy cartoonish sound design that fits the visuals perfectly, each character has their own sound effects too which is a really nice touch. The series continued on the Super Nintendo with Clay Fighter Tournament Edition which is pretty much the same game, just more of it, more backgrounds, options and versus modes, like you know, a tournament option. There's also a sequel, Clay Fighter 2 Judgment Clay, an obvious play on Terminator 2 Judgment Day, albeit a few years after the fact. This game upgrades Badmister Frosty to just Frosty and replaces Blue Suede Goo, Ichabod Clay, Helga, Bunker and Taffy with Hoppy, a rabbit doing a Rambo impersonation, Nana, Half Man, Half Banana, Goo Goo, a giant baby with a spiked bat, Octo and Octopus on two legs, and Kangoo, a boxing kangaroo. The game has the same spirit but with a significant amount of polish, the sprite animation is a bit better, the combat however is more the same, albeit a bit faster just with different characters. So if you like the first game and just want more of it then here you go. I personally like the characters a lot more in the first game. The series then moves to the N64 with Clay Fighter 63 and a third, and at this point the gameplay suffers so badly for trying to accommodate the model animations that it feels almost broken. The follow-up Clay Fighter Sculptor's cut at least adds a lot more features and characters, and the gameplay is more geared toward how the original games played, thankfully. It's also infamously one of the most expensive N64 cartridges at around $400. So, if you're jonesing for a Clay Fighter game, you're probably better off sticking with the Super Nintendo, or even the Genesis port of the first game since it's pretty much the same game. I would say your enjoyment of Clay Fighter depends on two things. One is that if you can appreciate video game history and understand the sheer amount of work that went into this one, and two being the game's sense of humor, which is tricky because not everyone laughs at the same stuff. So, is Clay Fighter worth playing today? It depends on how you feel about those two things, because let's face it, the combat here is so incredibly limited that Clay Fighter is probably best enjoyed busting out once a year at most, having a laugh, and then putting it away ten minutes later.