There is a new homebrew first-person shooter for the Sega Saturn — or rather, there has been for nearly two months.
That’s because Vigilant Paradise was announced by its developer Riccardo Campione — under the label Playnautic — via a YouTube video Nov. 5 that got practically no traction online. It wasn’t until a person named dmar3000 stumbled upon its Itch.io store page and posted about it on Reddit yesterday that it came to the wider community’s attention.
“I was on itch.io and typed in ‘Sega Saturn’ on the search bar for this game (and a few others) to pop up,” dmar3000 wrote on Reddit. “I’m always typing in ‘Sega (Genesis/Mega Drive/ Saturn/Dreamcast) Homebrew’ on search bars [because] roms and isos are out there for these consoles.”
After SHIRO! community member Privateye spotted that Reddit post, he spread the news to the SegaXtreme and SHIRO! Discord servers where Saturn fans reacted with surprise and excitement.
“I only saw it there because I bothered to scroll down, it doesn’t have many upvotes,” Privateye said.
A stylish Saturn shooter
Vigilant Paradise follows two buddy cops as they take down a terrorist cabal in the sun-drenched city of Paradise filled with palm trees, seagulls and danger. Between blasting bad guys, they drop cheesy one-liners in voice-acted in-engine cutscenes.
The store page describes the game thusly:
- A full single-player campaign with 3D characters, weapons and levels.
- Two playable characters with differing weapons and story paths.
- More than 15 minutes of in-engine cutscenes with cheesy, ’90’s-style voiceovers.
- A shameless overuse of CD synth music.
- A symphony of Japanese silicon — utilizing both Saturn CPUs, both VDPs, all standard memory chips, CD audio and PCM playback.
“Full single-player campaign” isn’t an understatement. SHIRO! community member G.G. beat the game tonight and reported that it features six levels after the tutorial section. It took G.G. about three hours to beat, including parts reattempted after dying. That makes it possibly the longest Saturn homebrew game thus far.
“There’s a bit of [bugginess] in the helicopter sniping stage that can happen sometimes, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed it!” G.G. said. “Definitely worth playing through!”
The download includes CUE, BIN and ISO files so it can be used with a variety of Saturn software emulators and optical drive emulators, not to mention burning to a CD-R. The store page recommends using an ODE with real hardware, as software emulators like Mednafen, Kronos and Yabause have long load times or glitches. For its part, the MiSTer FPGA’s Saturn core exhibits audio glitches when the music attempts to loop but otherwise runs the game fine.
The game runs in 320 by 240 resolution and automatically adjusts itself depending on whether it’s running on a 60hz NTSC console or a 50hz PAL system. “The gameplay and sound should not run noticeably slower on PAL,” the store page says.
Vigilant Paradise doesn’t use analog control or any other special controllers like the Shuttle Mouse. On a standard pad, the D-pad moves forward and backward and strafes. The A and B buttons turn left and right. The C button crouches — press it again to stand back up. X button reloads your gun, Y button puts it away and Z button is a 180-degree quick turn. Both L and R triggers are used to shoot. Movement is fairly slow, making for more deliberate gunplay than, say, Doom. But like Doom, there’s no looking up and down — shots automatically hit higher-up enemies as long as the player is aiming in their direction on the X axis.
A commercial homebrew game
Unlike most homebrew Saturn games, Vigilant Paradise isn’t available for free. It normally costs US$10 on Itch.io, although as of this writing it’s on sale for $7. Riccardo Campione implores people not to pirate it in the license text file included with the game download.
“Please support indie development,” he wrote. “This game is not freeware. It was a self-funded, five-year journey of many a late night.”
According to the license text file, JoEngine was used to develop the game. Since JoEngine uses the Sega Graphics Library, it’s legally dubious to sell a game made with it, although Vigilant Paradise isn’t the first to do so Red Moon: Lost Days was developed in JoEngine and physical copies of it have been sold since 2023.
This appears to be Riccardo Campione’s first Saturn game. His Playnautic website mentions just one other homebrew game: a Mega Drive action side-scroller named Super Heavy Duty that’s went on sale on Itch.io in 2020 for $5.
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