Starting July 1 and running until the end of the month, the SHIRO! community will be hopping into the cockpits of HIGH-MACs to face off against the fighting factions of a resource-depleted Earth circa 2015. That’s right, SHIRO! is playing the first entry in Game Arts classic mecha series, Gungriffon!
Participants will blast their way across the battlefields of the Eurasian continent, competing for the best score for each of the eight mission stages. The “Eurasian Commandos” category — that being the highest combined score across all story missions — will be awarded to the top three winners.
Time Attack challenges also will take place, with the “Pilot’s License“ and “Company Veteran“ awards going to performance in the two “Exercise” missions. Only times where all enemies were killed will count for these challenges. We encourage participants to record their top times and submit the runs to speedrun.com, which does not yet have submissions for this game.
Players will be competing on 60Hz versions of the game on Normal Difficulty. Top scores and times are shown on the “Ranking” screen accessible from the main menu.
Bespoke SHIRO! Gungriffon Community Challenge stickers will be awarded to all winners, with first place overall receiving a challenge T-shirt.
For those of you who want to play Gungriffon this July using twin-stick controls, SHIRO!’s Double Dime has you covered!
Some pointers to help you make the most of your HIGH-MAC can be found here.
RULES:
• Real Sega Saturn hardware only (ODEs allowed)
• No emulation. No Action Replay or Pseudo Saturn cheats.
• 60Hz only! Normal Difficulty (for Score Attack challenges).
• Photographic evidence of times/scores is mandatory. Photo submissions should be of the “Ranking” screen for both Score and Time Attack.
• The challenge organizers reserve the right to request video evidence for submissions.
To submit your score, please post a photo on the SHIRO! Community Challenge Discord channel and complete this submission form.
SCORE ATTACK:
• Stages 1-4
– Operation Dandelion Seed (Kharkov)
– Operation Unbound (Kiev)
– Operation Foxhunt (Novosibirsk)
– Operation Bloodstorm (Ulan Bator)
• Stages 5-8 – Begin July 15th
– Operation Chicken Cage (Datong)
– Operation Shock Wave (Lianyungang)
– Operation Iron Storm (Weifang)
– Operation Aurora (East Ural)
– Eurasian Commandos – Top three overall combined scores
TIME ATTACK: Full-Kill Completion Required
• Pilot’s License (Exercise: Beginner)
• Company Veteran (Exercise: Expert) – Begins July 15
The Gungriffon franchise has long lingered just on the outside of “best mecha games” conversations, a denegation only exacerbated by its two decade-long hiatus. A growing recognition of the series has been building as of late, thanks in part to an English localization effort for Gungriffon II on the Sega Saturn — the only release in the franchise locked to Japan. This English patch — which has been publicly available since January 2022 as a v.0.97.5 Alpha build — was made by The SSG, Knigh0fDragon, and Lacquerware.
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