 Psst! Nintendo made another announcement the other day of four new games headed to their Nintendo switch online service. One was Fire and Ice, a damn good puzzle game for NES. Another was Psycho Dream, a side-scrolling action-platformer that looks and sounds unlike almost any 16-bit game ever. There is also Prehistoric Man and... you know, it... exists. It's fine. It's... it's there. And the fourth game was Doomsday Warrior, and it's, uh, not great. Kinda weird because both Psycho Dream and Doomsday Warrior were developed by Telnet Japan, the same dev team that made the VALOS series, as well as some quality shoot-em-ups for the Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx 16. But Doomsday Warrior is just one of those bandwagon games where apparently every publisher on Earth had to latch onto the Street Fighter 2 craze of the early 90s, so as a result, tons of developers were tasked with rushing half-assed, one-on-one fighting games as soon as possible. Doomsday Warrior first hits you with a whopping two game modes, normal mode and two-player versus, and that's it. In your first fight, the first thing that'll jump out at you is the wonky controls. For one thing, the B button jumps. Yep, that's right, up is not jump in this game, but X kicks and Y punches, and L and R are your block buttons, and that's it. The A button wasn't even assigned to anything, so there's no weak punch or strong punch or anything like that, despite utilizing a six-button controller. And back on the D-pad doesn't automatically block, so there's a lot to get used to here. There are special moves, and they usually consist of holding a direction on the D-pad for a few seconds before hitting an attack button, like how this guy here does a charged dash punch thing, as well as throw a projectile. They're different for each character, but they can be a bit finicky to execute, since you can't really be doing anything else while you're holding down a direction. Thankfully, this game does pace itself well enough, so you can dodge or block and avoid attacks, so you can set up your next move. If you're able to hold down a direction long enough before hitting an attack button, you'll set off a full screen attack. Of course, your computer AI opponent doesn't have that limitation, and can just throw those at you anytime it wants. Normal mode has you choose from seven fighters. Of course, we got the Ryu and Ken ripoffs, with Sledge, Hero of Earth, and Laban, Military Deserter. What kind of a name is that? There's also a Road Warriors ripoff named Aman, Heavy Metal King. We've got Daisy Dancing Plant. We've got P-Lump Fat Bomber. Get it? P-Lump? Plump? We've also got Grimlock Dizzin' Lizard. What is a Dizzin' Lizard? Maybe they meant Dizzin' Lizard? And we have New Form, Living Liquid, who, I gotta admit, does some pretty cool stuff. You can fight each of them in any order you'd like, and if you're able to do that, you get to the one big positive this game has. You get a certain number of points to level up your character. You can choose to level up punches, kicks, your defense, or the strength of your special moves. After that, you fight two more monsters before fighting the final boss. This game does have a password system, so if you want to skip to the final boss, you can head over to Game Facts and look those up. I will give credit where it's due. Some of the fighters look kind of neat. The hit detection is okay, I guess. Each fighter does come across as distinct in both looks and fighting style, well, except for the cliche Ryu and Ken characters. One thing I just could not get past, though, is the music. Does this sound like fighting game music to you? What am I, shopping at Joann Fabric? I kept expecting Steve Wynwood to start shouting at me to bring him a higher love. So yeah, Doomsday Warrior is one of those games where I can't really call it bad, because, I mean, there's 16-bit fighting games out there, like Fighting Masters and Street Combat and Rise of the Robots. This game is nowhere near as bad as those, but it's just not that good either. So there's no way I can recommend this one in a world where stuff like Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Killer Instinct, Ninja Turtles, Tournament Fighters, and all those SNK fighters exist. One last thing I want to point out here is the screen you get to when you lose. First, there's the top-notch text formatting that clearly showcases the amount of effort that went into this one. Then you've got the cute little fighters duking it out at the bottom. Why can't I fight as those guys? And last, you're met with the option, I give up, I'm sorry. No, I'm not. I'm not sorry. And I'm not sorry for giving this game a thumbs down. You can find much better 16-bit fighters elsewhere. All right, that's all for now, and I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.