Submission #8033: SioN's DOS Duke Nukem: Episode 1 - Shrapnel City in 06:58.92

Duke Nukem's first game, a 2D platformer shooter on the DOS predecessing the well known first person shooters.

I used the shareware version from 3drealm's legacy page, ran the install.exe on dosbox and made an image file from the folder it installed.

This TAS improves on Foone's old TAS from 2010 by about 10 seconds dropping the time under 7 minutes using some general optimization, new strats and a completely new glitch! Quick thanks to slamo for finding me duke's X, Y memory address it helped greatly through every level.

There is only really one trick we use in the run and it's called "fast fall". whenever duke gets hit when he is jumping up he will stop gaining height and fall instead. This can also be a problem if an enemy is right where you need to jump or if you need to jump but an enemy's shot is in the way then you might need to wait before jumping.

As it's the first level it's very simple and thus is largely similiar to the old TAS, but immediatly the start is different. I land on the platform right below where duke spawns as jumping from here to the barrel pile I waste less time being in the air waiting for duke to land allowing for a quick climb.

When falling down before heading to the right I disable hints because they freeze everything everytime they pop up and they pop up for nearly everything you do.

Just before the end door there is a barrier you need to destroy out of your way. barriers take 10 hits from your shots and it will kill you on contact even from full health.

This level teaches you about the breakable blocks and is a nightmare in RTA runs as this game loves to eat inputs. Also saved a bit of time here over the old TAS with shooting the blocks.

Now near the end of the level there is a weird fire spinning enemy that I could have killed to not take damage but before the end door there is a block which you have to jump over and since the corridor is not that tall you'll hit your head which (sometimes) causes your horizontal movement to pause for a few frames so I get hit by the enemy mid jump which forces duke to start falling down onto the block.

Now this level is quite big and you'll have to go around the whole level gathering a few keys and a keycard that you'll need to access the end door.

In front of the green key I break the gray box that contains a dynamite that hurts you to get invincibility frames so I can ignore the spike that is on the block on the wall and can quickly jump up.

After the weird ball snake you fall down on to this light blue platform and these require you to land on top of them twice and then they will break. on this platform we also have a spike ball which we can abuse by jumping then getting hit by it making us fall down instatly breaking the platform. We also got our first upgrade: extra shots from the gray box there, with this we can now have up to two bullets on screen at once.

After falling down we'll need to go left to grab our second upgrade: the jumping shoes which allow us to jump a block higher this is needed to progress in the level.

On the way to the right there is a monitor through which our antagonist would say something smart but we jump over the trigger. You can quickly close the textbox but the main problem is it kills your movement.

Here we have another barrier to destroy. It's quite high so we'll need to jump but thanks to our stupid shoes we'll hit our head if we dont back up a bit otherwise we'd need to do three jumps.

Quite the boring level, just boring corridors. On the elevator ride up I delay jumping off a bit as there is an enemy waiting for me off screen which would hit my head and cause me to fall down but by waiting a bit longer the enemy has come on the screen and duke can kill it by jumping even if that doesn't make sense.

At the top of the level there is another monitor screen and im able to jump between the triggers to skip it completely unlike the old TAS.

Yet another barrier but this time they gave us some convenient barrels to stand on so we can just spam shoot to destroy the barrier.

Nothing new here, on the elevator I shoot a gray box that would be on our way later (also shooting the all the green enemies because we hate them) and jumping over another monitor trigger and we get our third upgrade: the glove. We use it to open up those red bridges.

Near the start we have another monitor but this one is faster to read thanks to the conveyor belts on the ground allowing us to run faster.

We also get the grapple here which allows us to hang on certain cealings.

There is nothing to really comment on for this level. get the key and get out.

Now the best level in the game and the pinnacle of level design. go right to get the key then head back left to the end door. the rest of the level is above the hang bridge

Now here we have our new glitch: the barrier skip (found by carmen_the_frog on 19th January 2020 (oops TAS is 3 years late)). Now normally to get through the barrier you'd need the keycard in the level but with this glitch we can simply walk through it if we walk on the right frames. Also after im completely inside the barrier coming from the left trying to walk left will have the game try to stop me from going through the barrier from the right putting me completely on the otherside in a frame (it also works when coming from the right).

The light blue platforms again, this time we use the mech enemy to get hit during our jump for a fast fall.

Going into the giant barrel pile its faster to hit your head and fall down where the mech is as you spend less time in the air waiting to land so you can jump again.

10 shots into Proton breath will send him flying to the moon.

While this saves a nice amount of time over the old tas it's of course not perfect. specifically biggest time save would be figuring out the barrier skip completely. here I managed to find some inputs to make it work but you can do it faster. It still saved 3~ seconds but you can squeeze like 1 more second from it.

slamo: Claiming for judging.

slamo: Cleaned up the branch name to match the old TAS, the episodes were released as separate games so there is no need to have a branch name here.

Great work for your first submission! Not only did you incorporate a new skip, but there are little improvements in almost every level. You mentioned it's possible to do the skip faster, but it's unknown how it works and I think you put in good effort, so I think it's fine. Accepting as an improvement to the current publication.

fsvgm777: Processing.