The results of the SegaXtreme 29th Anniversary Sega Saturn Game Competition were announced today, with homebrew survival horror game Cold Case, the English localization of Stellar Assault SS and a tool for muxing Cinepak video took home the top prizes.
In a livestream on his Twitch channel, competition organizer EmeraldNova announced the results of nine judges’ ballots for the 34 entries across three categories: Original Games; Hacks, Patches and Translations; and Utilities. An on-demand video of the presentation can be viewed on YouTube.
Cold Case won best original game as a survival horror experience stylized similar to Silent Hill. It features a man exploring 3D environments from a third-person perspective who’s searching for evidence in creepy locales like his dingy apartment, an abandoned town and a rundown church. He has to defend himself with firearms he finds along the way when he encounters strange, deadly creatures during the short but impressive demo. It was made by JBeretta, who had entered a homebrew 2D platformer in 2021’s competition called Zygo that he’d begun converting into a 3D platformer in early 2023. So it was a surprise when that effort pivoted to a survival horror game for this year’s competition.
The English localization patch for Stellar Assault SS won in the Hacks, Patches & Translations category after a team led by Lacquerware — and including this reporter — recorded thousands of lines of dialogue with volunteer voice actors and inserted them into the game in place of its Japanese speech. One of the team’s members, Silos, also included in the patch support for the Saturn’s Mission Stick controller, a natural fit for the space combat simulator that strangely wasn’t enabled when the game shipped in Japan in 1998. Some of the team members also created an English localization patch in 2021 for Bulk Slash that included redubbed dialogue and new support for the Twin Stick controller.
Winner of Best Utility, the Sega Saturn FILM Muxer is a video editing tool for processing full-motion video for Sega Saturn formatted in Cinepak, a video container commonly found in the console’s games. The competition entry is an update of the initial release in 2022 that adds direct insertion of PCM or ADX compressed audio streams, along with other features like an extractor tool and data-formatting options. Trekkies, who’s perhaps the homebrew community’s foremost expert on Saturn video formats, said he made the tool to make other homebrew efforts easier, and it’s already paid dividends — it was used to make the Stellar Assault SS localization patch.
While Cold Case, Stellar Assault and FILM Muxer came out on top, the competition was full of impressive efforts representing the Saturn community coming together to celebrate the console. The full rankings are below:
Original Games
1. Cold Case JBeretta
2. Cubecat 7shades
3. Slide Hop Ponut64
4. Red Moon: Lost Days Sansigolo
5. Utenyaa ReyeMe & team
6. Sweeper Squad Slinga
7. Maria Renard’s Revenge (port) Z-team
8. PICO-8 emulator (port) Ervilsoft
9. Telocation Gemini Cobradile
10. Pixel Poppy Pong Hassmachine
11. Sonic Boss Tech Demo am.25 & Shadowjackal
12. Cinepak Demo Reel TrekkiesUnite118
13. Wordle not-AI-generated
14. Flashback: The Quest for Identity (port) VBT
15. VBT Touring Truck Championship VBT
16. Jacky Car Cafealpha
Hacks, Patches & Translations
1. Stellar Assault SS (English translation and mission stick support) Lacquerware & team
2. Shadows of the Tusk (English translation) Knight0fDragon
3. Silhouette Mirage (English translation) Rasputin3000 & team
4. Dungeon Master Nexus (English translation) ChristopheF
5. Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers (incomplete English translation) TrekkiesUnite118
6. J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues (English translation) Arjak & team
7. Sakura Wars (Portuguese translation) Sansigolo
8. Doom (nightmare difficulty, some fixes) Fafling
9. Shining the Holy Ark (hard mode, sound test unlocked, etc.) Rikapso
10a. (tied) Sonic 3D Blast (play only special stages) Bo Bayles & Privateye
10b. (tied) Sonic Jam (play as Tails) Bo Bayles & Privateye
12. Radiant Silvergun (text removal) Privateye
13. Sega Rally Championship (various changes) Rings of Saturn
Utilities
1. Film Muxer TrekkiesUnite118
2a. (tied) Kronos NetLink Edition Knight0fDragon
2b. (tied) 240p Test Suite Hitomi2500
4. Dungeon Master Nexus translation kit ChristopheF
5. Shining Force III file editor Rikapso
Many of the top-placing entries are offered cash and other prizes donated to the competition. More details on the competition as well as a breakdown of how many points judges awarded each entry can be found on Emerald Nova’s website.
To learn more about the entries, check out SaturnDave’s roundup or watch PandaMonium’s video showing all of them off:
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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