The upcoming seventh SEGA Saturn SHIRO! Online Tournament is gonna be … Duke Nukem 3D!
Since Duke is pretty playable even with high ping, we’re opening this tournament up to both hemispheres and bumping it up to 32 participants. If you are not sure if your connection speed is fast enough, just hit me up and we can test it out. Come get some!
What’s really exciting this time around is that we’re getting a “Tournament Edition” hack from legendary Saturn hacker Bo Bayles that fixes the scoring system. Normally, you are subtracted a point every time you die, but this hack only counts up when you get a kill.
Since there is no time limit, we’re going to be doing Dukematch with monsters set to off, first to 5 points, best of three rounds (one round is allowed, too, if both players agree to it). Once you or your opponent reach 5 points, hit start and pick “quit” and select “yes.” This will send you back to level select.
Only choose the Hollywood Holocaust or the Red Light District stage, start with either one and go back and forth. For Hollywood, please don’t go past the arcade room, and don’t go past the strip club room in Red Light. This should help players from going too long without any contact.
To help avoid slowdown as much as possible, you must use an ethernet cable with your PC or Raspberry Pi going forward — wireless will not be allowed. For the tournament it will now be mandatory that you do a complete reboot of your internet router/modem devices before your match. Streaming your match is also now forbidden to help you have the best possible connection speed. Recording your match and posting it in the tournament chat is highly recommended, but not required.
Also, as a bonus, Bo has reversed the “Jevons” 3D Pad controls cheat (Start, Y, Y, Z, Z, X, X, Y, X, Z) so that it’s always activated. Normally you annoyingly would need to re-enter this code each time you respawned — now it’s just on and ready to go for your 3D Pad pleasure. This hack also works if you pick the “Traditional” option at boot to play offline.
You move with the YZBC buttons and aim with the 3D Pad’s analog stick, similar to how you move around in Turok or GoldenEye with the yellow C buttons on the N64 pad (WASD style for your right thumb).
You can download the new Tournament Edition of Duke Nukem 3D with the Jevons controls here. Also, for anyone who doesn’t own a 3D Pad, Bo has also hacked it so that the Jevons code can be disabled with a much simpler code than the original. Just pause the game and push up twice to switch to standard controls. You will need to do this each time you respawn.
Fun fact: XL2’s impressive HellSlave and Irréel homebrew Saturn games also use this control scheme with the 3D pad!
First-time tournament winners will receive a Saturn Net Hat and Netlink Playable Patch made by Moosetracks:
Groovy!
This story was written by Double Dime., who organizes NetLink League tournaments in the SHIRO! Discord server.
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