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Yesterday, we mercilessly tore apart your favorite games, explaining in cruel, cold detail why you have always been wrong for loving them. Today, the tables are turned. Today, we open ourselves up to ridicule.
So go ahead and make fun. Or, if you appreciate the secret shame of a guilty pleasure, join us in the comments below. Declare your hidden love, once and for all! You’ll feel a lot better in the end, we promise.
This is a game I really should hate, too. In the winter of 1997, I paid 70 of the Queen’s finest notes to buy it. For some reason, though, I don’t. In its own totally deluded way, there’s a certain charm in just how bad the last proper ClayFighter game is. It knows it's shit. I know it's shit. But I tolerate it.
I don’t mind the game stealing ideas from every other beat ‘em up in history. It lifts its Claytalities straight from Mortal Kombat. And the dual health bar system has been taken from the almost equally rubbish Killer Instinct. It should feel hopelessly derivative. But, somehow, it doesn’t.
Above: What they should have done with Street Fighter IV
Maybe my baffling love is tainted by the enduring image of unwrapping my very first console in 1993 - a pre-owned SNES - with a copy of Super Mario All Stars and the original ClayFighter sitting snugly beside it. It could be the retina-confusing charm of those stop motion-style, plasticine pugilists. Who knows, maybe I’ve just suffered a slight stroke that’s paralysing the critic in me while writing this.
All I know is I like Clayfighter 63 1/3. It exists in a world where the developers are idealistic enough to think that the seven people who bought it wanted a limited edition "Sculptor’s Cut." It’s different. And, above everything else, it lets me twat Earthworm Jim in the face with an unwholesome Santa Claus.
