Oh good, this topic was dug up.

I was strongly disappointed in Shadow Warrior. The difficulty is completely jacked thanks to enemies that can one hit kill you, cheap enemy placement throughout the levels and a fairly questionable arsenal.

The six shot shotgun takes 3 shots to down a standard enemy ninja and there's no indication when you're going to need to reload (oh, you want to manually reload? Too bad!), the sword is pretty much the best weapon in the game except for when you have to deal with kamikazes, and who the shit thought that having a needlessly drawn out boss fight against an enemy that can one hit kill you was a fun idea? Better yet, who's idea was it to recycle the same enemy multiple times throughout the game?

Don't even get me started on the enemy counts in each level. They got gratuitously padded up by having enemies respawn in areas you've previously cleared when you complete minor goals to artificially boost the difficulty. Great design decision there! Let's make the game more challenging not through clever enemy placement and level design but by further cheapness that complements the already questionable damage model!

There's some really neat things that they do throughout the game with the engine and some of the level designs are really nice (and pretty damn massive), but you can tell the game was in development hell. 3D Realms did a terribly job of polishing it off when they picked up the game and tried to finish it off themselves with a basically different cast of people than who had started work on it. It's funny that they had to choose between Shadow Warrior of Blood and chose Shadow Warrior as they felt it was the strongest of the two, only for it to turn out so poorly and then have QStudios bought out by Monolith and Blood to turn out so fucking well (except for that last episode and the questionable expansion Plasma Pak, but whatever).

JonoF's port was a nice gesture, but the userbase of Shadow Warrior isn't really big enough to motivate him to update it any further than where it's at now. It's a bit crash prone and fairly buggy; if you must play a modern port, ProAsm's is the only way to go (it's an updated version of JonoF's). Especially if you intend to play Wanton Destruction, which isn't compatible with JonoF's port. And you want to play Wanton Destruction.

If you want the best compatibility (CD audio, most stable, works with Twin Dragon and Wanton Destruction without a hitch, etc), play that sucker in DOSbox. Make sure you mount the disc image with the IMGMOUNT command as follows (add it to the autoexec section at the bottom of the dosbox.conf):

imgmount d "Shadow Warrior.cue" -t iso

This is assuming you ripped an image of Shadow Warrior as "Shadow Warrior.BIN/CUE" (I recall ISO doesn't properly support multisession discs, so the only other naively supported option is BIN/CUE). The above command mounts the disc image as virtual drive "d" in DOSbox, so install Shadow Warrior to your virtual "c" drive and go to town.

Then, when you finish getting your Shadow Warrior and Wanton Destruction fix, play Blood and Cryptic Passage for Blood. Or play Duke Nukem 3D, Duke it Out in DC and Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach. For reals.