Historically speaking claymation should have come to prominence shortly after film was invented and then discarded in favour of newer technologies such as Marionation and Super Marionation. After all clay was readily available, cameras couldn’t move very quickly and RPG’s had yet to be invented so people had a lot of unused level grinding time. Either the possibilities of moulding clay into grotesque facsimiles of Yorkshiremen and dogs were beyond the wildest dreams of early filmmakers or even they realised that three years to make a hideously twee twenty minute film was a waste of time. One can only imagine the wasted effort that went into making Clayfighter 2: Judgement Clay the dismal failure that it was.
Clayfighter II had numerous selling points, it’s name featured a pun on the title of a popular film, it was the sequel to the perplexingly popular Clayfighter and it was a sub par fighting game featuring characters made of clay, “Clay – Fighters” if you will. It was part of a weird subset of gimmicky fighting games designed to distract people from Virtua Fighter which had proper 3D graphics and everything. Essentially these games were all rubbish slow Street Fighter II knock offs which replaced standard sprites with all manner of bizarre apparitions. (i.e Ballz which replaced them with people made of 3D effect balls, Mortal Kombat which replaced them with pictures of John Turk dressed as different coloured Ninjas, Rise of the robots which featured pre-rendered robots and Music by Brian May and Shaq Fu which featured basketball players and Egyptian mummys.) “Needles to say” none of this trickery worked and by the late 90’s everyone was enjoying Battle Arena Toshinden in all it’s glory.
Probably the most annoying thing about Clayfighters was that it thought characters which acted against expected type were absolutely hilarious. I’m guessing the design meeting went a little like this
Work Experience boy:
“Imagine a rabbit right it’s all cute and sweet and that. Not this one! Instead of being sweet Hoppy the battle bunny is like Arnold Swarzanegger and had a voice that sounded a bit like his and also GET THIS all his moves are based around rabbit puns. (Spinning Carrot/Rabbit Punch/Warren and Battery). Now imagine as well a Snowman! Pretty innocent yes? Not this one Bad Mr Frosty is well bad; he even says “I’m bad”. That’s the only thing he says that’s not a snow based pun though, no one has ever thought of doing a character like that before. For example he could say things like “Stay cool” and “Chill out” which would be hilarious as he is a man MADE OF ICE. Now imagine a baby right. All sweet and cute yeah? Well not this one! Its ten foot tall and hit’s people with a spiky rattle! Now imagine a banana, pretty harmless yeah? Not this one! This banana is a man and he says things like “peel dis” and “Unarmed!” while throwing bananas at people. (The bananas are smaller than he is). Also he has a cod Jamaican accent for no good reason. Right imagine a huge muscle-bound man with a mangled face wearing a pair of pants, pretty innocent yeah? Not this one! He’s fairly violent but his name is ‘Tiny’ in humorous contrast to his freakishly muscular frame. Also there’s a boxing Kangaroo, sort of vague octopus/glove thing and a blob of clay who turns into a number one and says “I never wash”.
Big Boss:
“Yeah whatever, thanks to the lucrative Earthworm Jim Franchise Interplay are in a golden age of prosperity which will never come to the end. I’m off to spend the thousands of pounds that we’re sure to make on Boogerman when it’s released. Just make sure you put in a voice over that sounds like the man from the B52’s and have him say New Aged Whack.”
It turns out that both the work experience boy and the big boss forgot to put in all the things that make fighting games good such as speed, balanced characters, precision controls and being able to knock your opponents trousers off thereby reducing his speed, It did feature some hidden characters but they were just the existing characters but coloured so as to appear as if viewed from behind sunglasses. I can’ remember their names but I’m sure they were all puns (Claymore the mine Rabbit, Twatface the frostclay man, Plantain Person, Ragamuffin Joe etc)
The only good bit of Clayfighters II is that when you turn into a circular saw with blob you can chop people in half and the B52’s sound alike says “Cut in half.” It is for that reason that I award the game three he definitely says unarmed out of a it’s because ha has no armaments to speak of, what you need to ask yourself is why he would be saying “Nana”. The fact that he is dressed as a banana would get the point across perfectly adequately.
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