For the purpose of this guide I assume you are simply a completionist like me and you don't necessarily feel the need to become a pro speedrunner. Basically what this achievement requires you to do is to beat any level of the game faster than the level's "3D Realms Best Time". This varies from level to level, each time you finish one of them you get a summary screen, where you can see this record.

You can try to do it on any level you wish, but it's easiest to go with the three options described below.

Level 12 (or Level 8 of Code of Honor episode) called Bath House has a 3D Realms Best Time of 10:00 minutes if I'm not mistaken. This gives you a lot of time to beat it. You can manage it by just hurrying up or better yet - memorising the paths that you need to travel. If you run into any problems, you can always consult the 3D Realms official Shadow Warrior walkthrough[legacy.3drealms.com].

Unfortunately, level skipping cheat codes do not seem to work in the Redux version of the game, so you'll need an earlier save if you've beaten the game already. If you've already beaten it and you don't have an earlier save, you'll either have to try on some other level (which will be significantly harder), or resort to the second method described below.

Seppuku Station, the first level of the game, is a very decent choice for this endeavor on the easiest difficulty. The level itself is short, has few enemies and not many environmental hazards that you'll have to watch out for. And you don't need a saved game. You have to beat the required time of 55 seconds here, which may seem impossible, but it's certainly doable when you employ certain two techniques. It'll be difficult, but if you have some skill in FPS games, it may save you beating the 7 levels that come before the Bath House.

The first technique is something called Straferunning[en.wikipedia.org]. Some of you will be familiar with this. Basically what this means is that in many older FPS games, the engine calculated the velocity of the player's character based on control input and the engines imperfections made it so that the player moves at higher than normal speed when running diagonally - inputting "forward" and "left" or "right" simultaneously. The difference was often minimal, but for speedrunning it was enough to shave off a few precious seconds, especially at long distances.

The second thing you'll need to know is a very obscure secret in Seppuku Station:
Literally a couple of seconds after the level begins and you hear the evil ninja say "Zilla sends his regards", a BUS will drive through the street below the apartment you begin in. What you need to do is use this bus, while it's still moving, as a platfrom to jump through the street and into a window. This is difficult to manage, but rewards you with circumvention of a large portion of the level, as you don't have to get the Gold Key to get inside the station, thus saving a lot of time. It also gives you a Riot Gun with a few shot shells that you can use to one-shot ninjas. Make sure you have the weapon auto switch option set to "ON".

This is a guideline of what you need to do:

• Make a quicksave immediately after the level starts - it will make retrying this much less frustrating
  
• Jump out of the window, hop on the bus and into the window on the other side of the street - the distance from the bus to the second window requires you to straferun in the air
  
• Ignore the two ninjas and hop into the luggage chute
  
• Kill the ninja in the room below and grab the controls for the yellow RC car that has the Silver Key attached
  
• Steer the RC car into the opening that will enable you to grab the key, it's in the upper-left corner from the camera's perspective
  
• Jump back into the luggage chute, ignore the two ninjas in the room, quickly run left and into the door
  
• Open the door, run through the fountain room and head straight for the key
  
• Head back, open the locked door, go inside the little cabin, pull the lever that gives you access to the railroad
  
• Run out of the cabin through the now open doors - they may open slowly, so duck quickly to get through faster
  
• Get on the railroad to your right and run through the tunnel. Either keep to the left side of the tunnel or strafe on the way there, so you'll avoid most of the bullets fired by a turret that is right in front of you
  
• There will be an opening on the right side that you need to jump on quickly - there's a train coming which will kill you if you're still on the tracks. The faster you run to this opening, the faster the train comes, which is a good thing
  
• Aside from the turret there will be a suicidal ♥♥♥♥♥♥ waiting for you. Fortunately, he is surrounded by two explosive barrels. Try to detonate them when he's close to them. You have to kill him while being as far as you can from the blast radius
  
• Hide from the turret's cone of vision and wait for the train to stop. There will be an explosion, which could be deadly for you, so wait until it stops exploding and run to the train doors
  
• Inside on your left will be another ♥♥♥♥♥♥ - ignore him. Turn right and run straight for the level exit.

If you have any doubts about this plan, just watch the video below.


As you can probably see, I am not a pro speedrunner and I have made many mistakes along the way, but still managed to get the achievement. Of course I edited out a dozen of failed attempts or two, but 95% of them stopper right at the beginning, when I failed to jump to the window. So basically the whole thing took me less than half an hour, while beating the first 7 levels of the second episode before even attempting the Bath House would have taken a lot more time than that.

As Royal_Tenenbaum pointed out - you can easily enter swgreed and swghost cheat codes and get to the exit of any level in seconds. But it isn't much fun, you probably don't wanna be a cheater and also I cannot confirm if cheat codes affect the achievements or not, so I'm not really sure if this would work. I will try to test this when I'll have the time.