Micro Motor Mayhem, Mobile Suit Gundam and the Saturn Ring Library are the big winners in the SegaXtreme Sega Saturn 30th Anniversary Game Competition, as organizer Emerald Nova announced Saturday in a livestream.
In the original games category, racer Micro Motor Mayhem beat out tribute game Shenmue: Back in Yokosuka by four points while the point-and-click adventure Pulitzer came six points behind Shenmue in third. The English translation of Mobile Suit Gundam won the hacks, patches and translations category, edging out the Doom fix patch by a mere two points, with the Bomberman Fight translation taking third place about 10 points behind. New software development kit Saturn Ring Library won in the tools and utilities category, beating out the latest version of Sega FILM Tools 3.0.1.
Full standings will be displayed shortly on Emerald Nova’s website.
This is the second year in a row that JBeretta has won the competition’s homebrew category after winning last year with Cold Case. Shadowmask, the team leader of the Gundam translation, also played a major role in last year’s winner in the hacks/patches/translations category, Stellar Assault SS. ReyeMe, the lead developer of this year’s utilities winner, Saturn Ring Library, headed up an original homebrew game called Utenyaa last year.
An earlier version of TrekkiesUnite’s second-place Sega FILM Tools won the utilities category last year under the name Sega Saturn FILM Muxer.
Had Fafling’s Doom fix patch won, it would have been the first time that an entry besides a translation won the hacks, patches and translations category.
There were 25 entries across three categories, including nine original games; nine hacks, patches and translations; and seven utilities. Most entries can be downloaded by finding the associated developer’s post in the competition thread or the competition discussion thread. Many of them also can be found in SegaXtreme’s Resources area.
Fellow SHIRO! PandaMonium looked at all of the contest entries, as well as other Saturn community projects that weren’t entered into the competition, in a video uploaded Saturday:
This year’s competition was announced last November and its deadline for entries was April 11. A panel of nine judges, including SHIRO! members TraynoCo, PandaMonium and SaturnDave, then had one month to try out all the entries and give their scores. The announcement livestream had been planned for May 11, the 30th anniversary of the Saturn’s release in North America, but was delayed until May 17.
While the main purpose of the contest is to highlight and celebrate homebrew efforts, there are prizes on the line, too, including a cash pool of nearly $850 and 3D-printed Saturn accessories like an optical drive emulator insert, a display logo and a controller stand.
This is the sixth year for the Emerald Nova-led competition, which began in 2019 with the 25th Anniversary Game Competition. But it was really a revival of an annual homebrew contest tradition on SegaXtreme that began in 2003 with the Sega Saturn Coding Contest. That line of contests fizzled out in 2009 amid a difficulty to find judges followed by a failed attempt to revive it in 2010-11.
This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!