Punching Day: Doomsday Warrior (Patreon)

Doomsday Warrior is a shitty Street Fighter II clone that has a drunk child's understanding of the game it's ripping off. If you asked a team of actual street fighters with traumatic brain injuries to develop a one-on-one fighting game, they'd do a better job than developer Renovation Products did. Yes, the developer's name is "Renovation." You know you're in trouble when the guys who made your competitive fighting game sound like they're selling poorly-made home improvement tools that come in a box marked "may cause dog blindness and fingers loss."

I looked it up and Renovation's address is now home to a chiropractor. That feels appropriate, as I fully believe that Renovation also got most of their ideas from the ravings of spectral entities.

But to be real, Renovation was just the American arm of a company named Telenet Japan. They were a pack of lunatics composed of a half-dozen subteams like the villains in an '80s action cartoon, with names like Micro World, Lasersoft, Wolf Team, and Riot (not that one). Telenet put out games about genderfluid space warriors, dinosaur pinball, and werewolf wrestling. I love their broken, nonsense worlds and award-winning dragons dearly.

I even have something of a soft spot for Doomsday Warrior, coming into my life as it did at a time when I didn't know what made a video game good or bad. It was enough, then, to simply enjoy the novelty of manipulating a character on the TV using a plastic controller. We had a higher tolerance for bullshit back before the days of digital distribution, too. When you rented a game from the local video store and you sensed that it might kind of suck, your choices were either to trick yourself into liking it or no second thing. But sure, the '90s were the "last good decade." Grow up.

We're adults now. We can look at things more objectively, except when a niche microfamous internet user we already have it out for says something we don't like. And for anyone who knows anything about video games, all I have to do to explain how much Doomsday Warrior sucks is to say that it uses the B button to jump. That's it, the game is ruined. The rest of this article is superfluous. Every other fighting game at the time and since uses up on the control pad to jump. The only other tournament fighter I can think of that has a dedicated jump button is Dangerous Streets for the Amiga CD32. Here's what that game looks like:

In fairness to Telenet, every game developer in the mid-90s was trying to make their own Street Fighter. If you weren't there, imagine the roguelike craze of today except the only people making commercial video games were overworked, chainsmoking Japanese 20-somethings who didn't even get their names in the credits for their trouble. Terrible one-on-one fighters were everywhere, and Doomsday Warrior is far from the worst, despite its many shortcomings. What's notable about the game to me today isn't how it plays, but how it was presented.

Telenet's manuals were awkwardly translated on the best of days, as Beast Wrestler's table of contents so aptly demonstrates.

You've got all the normal stuff: Items, Characters, "Regular Beast Operation," instructions on incorporating your business for tax purposes. Here's Doomsday Warrior's.

The inconsistent capitalization tells me that whoever wrote this wasn't getting paid enough to give a shit. On the other hand, "What's Happening Here?" strikes me as an earnest expression of incomprehension at the material they were being asked to interpret and, more broadly, abject confusion regarding the world which allowed it to exist.

First sentences are an art, and what a glorious picture this author has painted with theirs! Imagine a world so desolate, so bereft of hope, that no one would blink an eye when they emerged from a day of meaningless, underpaid labor to discover that the Tasmanian Devil had spun through the parking lot during the post-lunch slump. "Oh well, fuck it," the denizens of this cursed reality thought, "I'm more concerned with the way that nature is taking its toll on the way mankind lives, a statement as sensible as it is worded in the correct order."

"We haven't eaten in days. Food is scarce and drinkable water is dwindling. Jessica and I have begun to seriously consider whether we should kill the children to spare them the agony of starvation and whatever horrors come next. I tell ya, it's some real craziness!"

Main, who is a classic victim of '90s bishounen gender swapping, looked around her stupidly-named planet and saw that it was overpopulated. She went to earth to build a temple, and hold on, is Doomsday Warrior actually just Mormonism? Is there anything in the Book of Mormon about seven dudes taking over the planet by destroying all automobiles and poisoning the water supply, only to be rebuffed by the goodwill in men's hearts? That all sounds suspiciously Mormon to me. Tiktok, any thoughts?

Never mind.

Here we go. Fighting games are all about their weird, iconic dudes. You only have to take one look at Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat or Ivy from Soulcalibur to know what their whole deals are: ice ninja and teenage boy jackoff fantasy. In Doomsday Warrior, the characters are some of the blandest guys to ever automatically turn to face each other and do punches until one of them falls over. Telenet gave up halfway through filing the serial numbers off SFII's roster and spent the rest of the development cycle devising innovative new ways to torture the SNES sound chip.

SFII had Ryu and Ken, some of the most recognizable characters in video games. We never really minded that they were basically the same person, because it was kind of cool to have two rivals who fought with similar styles and could run down the clock throwing fireballs at each other. Doomsday Warrior has Sledge and Layban, who sound like the title characters in an unproduced '80s pilot about a cat-calling construction worker teaming up with a white-collar sexual harasser and traveling around the country making women uncomfortable.

Sledge is arguably our Ryu, and looks like he was drawn by an illustrator who once heard of something, someone called Goku. He has steel shin guards, which honestly would be pretty useful in a fight, and is a professional hockey, football, basketball, and volleyball player. Not only that, he's a Batman.

What happens when there's a hockey game and a football game on the same night, plus a mugging happening in the East Village? The answer is it doesn't matter, because Sledge was seduced to the ways of evil by learning how to defeat his greatest enemy: cars. And if I can give the writer of Doomsday Warrior's manual one earnest compliment here, a New Yorker who uses his recently-acquired superpowers to annihilate traffic is inspired.

Here's Layban, who the manual admits "is very similar" to Sledge, with one crucial exception. You see, his car-destroying abilities are not quite as developed. He's got an "under-publicized arm chop attack," but wait, I want to talk about the car thing. The first page of the manual used the mass destruction of cars and the lackadaisical response to it as one of the signals of the oncoming apocalypse. "Car Punching" is apparently a statistic measured alongside "Speed" and "Energy Projection." And remember those daisies that started growing out of cars? That was the work of the Girl character, Daisy. Girls don't punch cars, you see — they grow flowers out of them, because something something vagina.

What is it with this game and cars? Crucially, no cars actually appear in Doomsday Warrior. The only explanation I can come up with is that the guy who wrote the manual played two minutes of Street Fighter II as research, made it to the bonus stage, and walked away like, "Ok, I understand this game. It's about killing cars."

The only characters whose bios don't mention cars are Amon, a lost Road Warrior seduced into a life of rock and roll by a space wizard, and a big Chinese fella named P-Lump.

Remember E. Honda of SFII, the noble, powerful sumo whose bulk belies his ability to launch himself across the room like a furious man missile? P-Lump is a man who can be convinced to commit planetary genocide by telling him the location of a "good supply" of bread and cheese. His name is the answer to a question in a 1970s joke book asking "What do you call an overweight man pissing out a kidney stone?"

The only two characters in Doomsday Warrior that break the mold in any way are Grimrock and Nuform. Grimrock is an alien lizard monster whose claws are so powerful that — get this — he can stab a car with them and render it undriveable! Fear his sedan-piercing talons! Fear them!

Grimrock also gets the only ending worth finishing the game for: he returns home, where he is greeted by his space monster wife and children. Given that he's described as the villain's "pet" in the manual, I can only assume that his was a narrative about striking back against slavers to win his freedom. Good for him.

Nuform, meanwhile, is a sentient Capri Sun commercial.

She/it is undoubtedly the most unique character in the game, attacking by transforming its body into various forms. Nuform also has the biggest discrepancy between how she's depicted in the manual and how she appears onscreen.

Hey, I know I'm inviting a lot of very specific comments with this question, but uh, why does the ooze creature have huge jugs? The manual doesn't say anything like "Its luscious, toxic breasts are the envy of all the other Doomsday Warriors. Also, it can disable a car with a single titty strike." The mystery of Nuform's cans may always remain just that.

Speaking of, fighting games like Mortal Kombat were known for their secrets — hidden characters and stages that would only appear under certain circumstances. Doomsday Warrior goes a step further by treating the characters' special moves as secrets to be discovered. Sure, there are move listings, but they're for things like "jump" and "punch while crouching."

Want to shoot fireballs or cast lightning bolts? Figure it out, kid. Remember, this is 1994. You can't just look this shit up. The writer does, however, deign to explain how to block. If you'd played nearly any fighting game of the era, you'd think you just hold back on the D-pad, right? Fuck you for thinking that. Block is shoulder buttons.

You know what they say: in Doomsday Warrior, as in life, a block is better than taking a direct car! You know what else they say, a car in the claw is worth two in the lot! Early to car, car to car, makes a car car, car, and car. No, that's not what I car! Car me! Car! Car yourself! Car! Car! Car me, Doomsday Car-riors! Car! Car!!! Aiiieeeee!!!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and His Hot Witches, who sadly drowned in the capri sun homunculus's massive bazongas. RIP in Pacific Cooler, we will never forget you.

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