SegaXtreme Game Competition Roundup

For the 5th year in a row, SegaXtreme & Emerald Nova, bring us an outstanding lineup of Sega Saturn homebrew, patches and tools from this amazing community, marking the 29th Anniversary of the SEGA Saturn console and now the 5th Anniversary of this game competition itself!

Before digging right into this year’s submissions, here’s a look at the past 4 years of entries, showing just how much this event and the community has grown…

These previous efforts have inspired a growing number of people to join the Saturn development community and have helped create numerous tools and a knowledge-base that has lowered the ‘barrier of entry’ to Saturn development.

Below are this years’ entries in alphabetical order by name of each participant. For a detailed breakdown of the contest rules, judges and criteria, check out Emerald’s Game Competition Page.

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Original Game Category

7shades

Cubecat – 1.0.3
While it has been entered twice before (both in 2020 & 2021), this year’s entry represents a new build of the game consisting of several improvements and refinements, most important of which is a completely new rendering pipeline built from the ground up by 7Shades himself! There’s new content, gameplay and controls, including a new dash-pounce in addition to the standard double-jump, and you can now attack enemy rats them with a dash. Yarn now spawns from a portal that you can discover on the map, and touching that portal respawns the yarn to that location. There are many other improvements as well, and we highly recommend folks check this one out!

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am.25

Sonic Boss Tech Demo
Together with ShadowJackal, am.25 brings us this small demo showcase built in the course of 24 hours and based on the Egg Hover boss fight from Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast, with improved controls for Sonic. It’s a pretty basic demo, though it’s quite impressive, considering how quickly it was put together!

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Cobradile

Telocation Gemini
Cobradile’s first attempt at 3D on the Saturn comes in the form of a port of Telocation: Gemini, an N64 homebrew. While it’s just a prototype, it’s still a great start, and Cobradile plans on finishing it. Geometry is simpler than N64, there are no sound effects at present.

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cafealpha

Jacky Car
A racing game adapted from the eponym game for TI calculators, Jacky Car plays like a ‘top down Outrun’, albeit without beaches or opponent vehicles. It’s pretty basic and bare bones, but fun for a bit… Apart from the race itself, the game features a small demo that can be displayed when the score reaches 999999 points.

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Ervilsoft

Pico-8 Emulator
This is a PICO-8 emulator running on Sega Saturn! Pico-8 is a fantasy console created by Lexaloffle Games that runs in a Lua-based environment and mimics the limited graphical and sound capabilities of old 8-bit systems while utilizing processing power that far exceeds of any of those systems. It’s standard hardware recommendation of a 700MHz CPU is much more powerful than the Saturn’s measly dual 28MHz CPUs, so the very idea of attempting to run this on Saturn is insane… The amount of work that went into porting LUA to the Saturn and writing a super-optimized emulator from scratch was considerable.

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JBeretta

Cold Case
Styled like a Silent Hill-esque game, Cold Case has you play as an unidentified man trying to find “Evidence”. What this evidence is for, however, is pretty vague. Each piece of evidence transports you to another area of the game, and puts you head to head with ungodly creatures. You start the game in your apartment, nothing out of the ordinary, but you will quickly find yourself transported to a sort of “upside down” alternate universe where demons are out to get you. Still a work in progress but definitely one to check out for sure!

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nando

Pixel Poppy Pong
Play as Macchiato or Jelly Bean, who are desperately in love with Poppy (or something like that). Battle each other to score goals, avoid bombs, eat fish, gain hearts, and learn the secrets of the universe. If you win, you will earn Poppy’s affection forever. But if you lose, press start and try again! Each player gets 9 lives (hah! get it?). When you lose all 9 lives, the other player wins the match, and gets a star. Whoever gets 3 stars first, wins the game. It’s frantic and goofy with 2 humans though!

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not-AI-generated

Saturn Wordle
Novice ‘bare-metal’ Sega Saturn game developer, not-AI-generated, has brought us… well.. It’s Wordle… for Saturn! It plays exactly as you would expect it to, however, it does require a Saturn keyboard, so folks will either need to pony up $60 to $90 for this rare piece of Saturn hardware, or just play it in an emulator. Either way, it’s a fun little game, and it’s well made too!

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Ponut

Slidehop – previously ‘Pony Game’
Submitted twice previously in 2019 & 2020 as Slide Hop is a 3D ‘almost-platformer’, as it focuses on time-attack ‘racing’ with platformer-esque controls. The unique feature of Slide Hop is that you can slide & hop (in no particular order) to gain momentum in a skillful manner. Time your jumps, slides, hops, and turns correctly to get the gold medal time across 8 levels!

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Slinga

Sweeper Squad
A 12-player Mine Sweeper clone that runs at 480i and includes mouse support! Requires two 6 Player Adaptors for full twelve player support. The mouse support is a nice touch, though the cursor moves very slowly. The game itself is a lot of fun, and while I’ve not tested it out with more than 2 people, I imagine it’s fun chaos with a large group of people!

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SuperReye

Utenyaa
Utenyaa is a little multiplayer tank-smashing game about cat-girls riding on tanks. Your basic weapon is a main cannon (A Button). Your secondary weapon is a mine or the bomb (B Button) which can be obtained from crates that sometimes drop from the sky. The game was written in the latest version of C++ and uses Jo-engine.

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TrekkiesUnite118

Cinepak Demo Reel
With more people starting to tinker with FMV in their homebrew games, Trekkies threw together this Cinepak Demo Reel to provide some examples of the quality that can be achieved with the Cinepak video codec. The clips range from various different resolutions, frame rates, audio qualities, brightness and contrast, as well as aspect ratios. This way you can see how these all play a part in the overall quality of the encoding. You can also see an example of variable frame rate encoding. This demo reel essentially represents years of research on Cinepak and it demonstrates that Trekkies really IS the video codec master when it comes to Saturn. What he’s been able to do with Cinepak far outshines what folks were able to back in the day.

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VBT

Flashback – Updated port of REminiscence
Back in 2009 by hkzlab ported the REminiscence engine (by cyx) to Saturn, which ran the DOS/PC version of the game with great performance, albeit lower quality assets than the Mac & Amiga versions of the game. Subsequently, things like megacd cdda (essentially Amiga MOD music files and Mega CD speech files), full motion video cutscenes and higher resolution Macintosh backgrounds have been added to the engine. That’s where VBT has stepped in to port this updated engine to Saturn. Cutscenes are admittedly a bit choppy, and the game itself runs at a slide show frame rate, not yet having been optimized and far from complete. However, it’s an impressive effort nonetheless.

VBT Touring Truck Championship
VBT’s second entry is a tongue-in-cheek reference to SEGA Touring Car Championship, and the game drops you in a truck and has you drive straight until you come to the section of track where you tur- …yeah, no… you pretty much just drive straight… The truck selection menu makes a cute nod to several members of the Saturn development scene, including pinchy, El Piratero, CafeAlpha, ndiddy & Emperor Coconut!

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Z-TEAM

Maria Renard’s Revenge
Z-Team has created a Saturn port of their own port, Maria Renard’s Revenge, originally developed by Domkid using the Scorpion Engine for the Commodore Amiga CD32. In this tribute to 2D Castlevania games, you play as (you guessed it), Maria Renard, a young vampire huntress and distant relative of the Belmont Clan.

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Hacks, Patches & Translations Category

Arjak

J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues
As a follow-up to last year’s sneak peak demo, Arjak has brought us the complete J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues finally in ENGLISH! J.B. Harold is a gritty FMV detective mystery originally released for the Pioneer LaserActive, and ported to Saturn in addition to several other consoles. By extracting the English dialog from the LaserActive release and injecting it into the Saturn version of the game, Arjak managed to bring us spoken English dialog in addition to translated menus. This one has been long awaited, and we’re thrilled to be able to finally play it!

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Bo Bayles

Sonic 3D Oops All Special Stages
This patch to Sonic 3D Blast lets you play the Sonic 2-inspired special stages back to back, without going into the primary game! Developed by Sonic Team themselves, these special stages are some of the best in the Sonic series, but many folks haven’t had the opportunity to play them… Rumor has it that they were actually rescued bits from a scrapped Sonic game, but who can say really? This patch essentially changes certain bytes, preventing the game mode from switching to 0 (normal play) by keeping it at 1 (Tails special stages) or 2 (Knuckles special stages), enabling the collection of all emeralds in a single act!

Sonic Jam Tails World
Sonic World… The playground stage in the Sonic Jam collection. It was Sonic in 3D! For real! A dream come true in 1997. Alas, there was never much to it… You got a few missions, and you could explore some cool content that looked back on the history of Sonic, but that was about it… This patch extends Sonic World just a bit, by letting you play as Tails. Just select Sonic World from the title screen. It’s mostly a model swap, but there’s a bit more to it than that: Tails can fly! Think of Tails as easy mode for the Sonic Jam missions.

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ChristopheF

Dungeon Master Nexus
Dungeon Master Nexus was a Dungeon Master sequel released for Sega Saturn only in Japan. The game uses a true 3D graphics engine and consists of 15 levels. ChristopheF has translated the game into both English & French, which is quite the feat! Finally, western Saturn fans can enjoy this amazing dungeon crawler!

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fafling

Doom Fix
A fix patch for the original Japanese Sega Saturn release of Doom, this entry adds in the unused inferno sky and the nightmare difficulty (now available in the main menu with the other difficulty levels and saved in the password). It also features sound fixes to Stereo CD audio, pan and pitch and increased range & volume for sound effects. It also adds in the PSX menu music, with automatic exit to the title screen after 30s of inactivity is disabled to allow to hear the full track without having to press buttons regularly. Exit to title screen is still possible with the classic A+B+C+start. The patch offers a small improvement in performance (though the game still suffers from a low frame rate).

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Knight0fDragon

Shadows of the Tusk – English Patch with NetLink OS
This patch is 99% complete and translates Shadows of the Tusk into English so folks can enjoy the story line as well as the in depth gameplay. To assist with this translation, is the latest version of ‘Netlink OS’, which utilizes a custom version of the NetBand tunnel. Also included is a save that unlocks all of the cards, which may be handy in cases where special matches are held, and certain cards are needed.

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privateye

Radiant Silvergun – Text Removal
This is a fairly simple patch that prevents the on screen messages “PRESS START BUTTON” and “PLEASE WAIT” from appearing during gameplay, which arguably (depending on who you ask) improves the experience of playing Treasure’s STG masterpiece on Saturn. It works with standard retail game discs by activating the appropriate cheat code in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.545.

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Rasputin3000

Silhouette Mirage – English Translation
This is a complete translation of Treasure’s 1997 masterpiece, Silhouette Mirage, into English using the original Working Designs script for PlayStation. In an apocalyptic future, the Edo computer has gone beserk, dividing the world’s inhabitants into two mutant classes, Silhouette and Mirage. Now, the watchguard computer safety system has sent forth the Messenger of Justice to travel to Edo and repair the damage before the world is lost forever. As the Messenger, Shyna Nera Shyna, blast, beat, and bash your way through seven wild and bizarre stages using friendly parasite weapons to aid your advance against wacky enemies, huge fully-animated bosses, and devilishly difficult obstacles.

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Rikapso

Shining the Holy Ark – Hard Mode Patch
Rikapso brings us a ‘hardmode’ hack for Shining the Holy Ark that not only ramps up the game’s difficulty, but makes unused items obtainable, changes treasure and shops, changes some monster spawns/drops, fixes some minor bugs, unlocks sound test, and unlocks some shortcuts on the world map adding one as well. It also allows monsters to have different stats depending on the area they are found in. This mod is mainly for people who played the game before, love the game, and want a different experience playing.

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ROS

Sega Rally – X Project
This is a Sega Rally hack that changes up some textures and adjusts the stages for different times of day & color pallets. Another excuse to play Sega Rally again, which is never a bad thing…

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Sansigolo

Sakura Wars – Portuguese Translation
Now Portuguese Saturn fans can hop in a Koubu and join the battle, with this Portuguese translation of the original Sakura Wars for Sega Saturn! The original plot, inspired by Shochiku Kagekidan, takes place in an alternative Tokyo of the 1920s. The story follows the adventures of a secret all-female task force known as the Imperial Assault Troupe – Flower Division, as they defend the Imperial Capital, Tokyo, against evil. They are led by Ichiro Ogami, a recently graduated Imperial Navy Ensign assigned to the squad partly due to her unique ability to use a special type of armor that previously only women with high levels of spiritual power could operate.

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TrekkiesUnite118

Devil Summoner Soul Hackers – English Translation
This is a work in progress English patch for Soul Hackers, which was released on Saturn in Japan only. It uses the English 3DS version for its translation, however, the project itself represents quite as challenge for Trekkies as tracking down things like items, demon names, attacks, shops, menu screens, battle text, etc. has been rather tricky due to Atlus’ data storage scheme. The other issue is that some of the data is too big. The Saturn version in the look up tables uses 16-bit values to tell the game how many bytes it needs to jump a head to find the right piece of text. However the text on 3DS for at least 2 files for Demon Negotiation text (at least I think it’s that), is too big and exceed the max value you can store in a 16-bit value. On 3DS to fix this they increased the look up table values to be 32-bit values. So to fix this on Saturn we’ll need to either do the same kind of hack to make the game use 32-bit values (no idea how well this will work), or edit the text to be a bit shorter and take up less space.

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Tools & Utilities Category

ChristopheF

Dungeon Master Nexus – Translation Kit
This entry is a custom tool that allows Saturn fans to translate Dungeon Master Nexus into the language of their choice! The only Japanese language that this kit cannot replace is the spoken dialogs in the soundtracks of the 3 game videos, but it can add subtitles into these videos.
So far, the kit has been used successfully to build both English and French versions of the game. You can even study how they were made and use them as a basis for a new translation!

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hitomi2500

240p Test Suite
This is a work in progress port of Artemio Urbina’s 240p Test Suite. It has been released as a CD image and a cart image for flashing the Saturn gamer’s cart. As most folks are probably aware, the 240p test suite is designed to help in the evaluation of displays, upscalers, upscan converters and line doublers. It has tests designed with the processing of 240p signals in mind, although when possible it includes other video modes and specific tests for them. These have been tested with video processors on real hardware and a variety of displays, including CRTs and Arcade monitors via RGB. As a secondary target, the suite aims to provide tools for calibrating colors, black and white levels for specific console outputs and setups.

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Knight0fDragon

Kronos Emulator – NetLink Edition
This is a modified version of the Kronos emulator, which re-implements NetLink play, which Knight has fixed in order to achieve better gameplay and connectivity. This version should allow for players to cross play between Kronos and Saturn (as well as Yabause 0.9.14, though not recommended). Hopefully this will get more people involved in NetLink Online matches, which we at Sega Saturn, SHIRO! are always looking to recruit!

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Rikapso

Shining Force III – Translation Tools
This submission consists of a suite of programs to edit certain files in all of Shining Force 3’s scenarios. This way fans of the game can change virtually anything they wish. What an amazing idea!?

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TrekkiesUnite118

SEGA Saturn FILM Muxer – 2.1.0
An update to last year’s tool, this was designed to make dealing with FMVs in translation projects a little less painful. It takes the Audio from one Cinepak file, and combines it with the Video Stream from another Cinepak file. This can be useful if you want to say replace the audio in a Japanese FMV with dub audio without degrading the video quality of the original Japanese video. New features added since last year include the ability to extract audio from a Cinepak file, the ability to use RAW PCM, WAV, and ADX Audio files for the audio source and the ability to mux ADX Audio into any Cinepak file.

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