Not long after crowning the Steep Slope Sliders champions April 1 as part of its ongoing Community Challenge series, SHIRO! announced changes to future iterations of the popular event.
The Community Challenge, having recently completed its second month-long event in March with Cave’s 1997 snowboarding racer Steep Slope Sliders, will resume in May.
Co-organizer of the challenges and SHIRO! Discord server denizen Greogory Rasputin said in an interview a switch to every other month for the foreseeable future makes the series more sustainable for the long term.
Rasputin said the every-other-month model will help to “mitigate competitive burnout” and keep overhead costs for things like prizes down.
“There was mention of (competitive burnout) this month, and we did see less engagement than we did with (SEGA Touring Car Championship in February), but that was anticipated,” he said.
The Community Challenge events have been far from simple score attacks, featuring a variety of categories that include timed runs, hybrid scoring systems and “mid-month refresh” events.
The next Community Challenge is slated to begin in May, and Rasputin said details are forthcoming.
“I hope we can pick games that the whole community will want to participate in,” co-organizer Double Dime said. “I want to see a huge turnout in the May Challenge.”
The demand is high.
The first two Challenges saw a total of about 500 submissions from about 50 SHIRO! community members.
About 20 people submitted more than 200 entries for March’s Steep Slope Sliders Challenge. According to Rasputin, eight of the previous 11 world records for the game were broken during the challenge.
The one true King of the Mountain is surely SHIRO! Discord server member Fart Daily, who claimed the top prize in six of the eight time attack events.
Fart Daily’s times:
- Alpine: 50.76 seconds
- Extreme 00: 41.63 seconds
- Extreme 01: 54.9 seconds
- Extreme 02: 57.43 seconds
- Extreme 03: 1 minute, 1.1 seconds
- Snowboard Park: 1 minute, 7.53 seconds
Fart Daily said, as someone who enjoys skiing, he’s long been a fan of Steep Slope Sliders.
“Last month was definitely my most concentrated stint of sliding on the slopes,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known about this challenge had PandaMonium not told me about it in one of his YouTube streams.”
He said his strategy was to spend time in each course slowly making his way down the slope, taking in its geometry, to find the straightest line to the finish.
“Competing against extremely skilled Saturn players is one of my favorite things to do, so it was a blast!” Fart Daily said. “There are many god-tier gamers in the Sega Saturn SHIRO! Discord who are incredible at the game.
“I got to learn a ton of stuff about the game and how to get better thanks to a bunch of really smart players sharing their knowledge and different ways of thinking. It’s extremely cool that peeps get to play Saturn games competitively in 2024.”
Double Dime and privateye set the pace on the Artificial Valley and South Pole courses with times of 58.9 seconds and 1 minute, 1.3 seconds, respectively.
SHIRO! Discord member Sam owned the score attack category, claiming three out of four with high scores of 2,577, 3,896 and 6,332 on the Half Pipe, Snowboard Park and Astro Pipe courses.
Everyone’s favorite Saturn historian, PandaMonium, set the high score on the Asteroids course with 2,583 points.
“Some of the Saturn’s very best players gave this their all, and it made me very happy to see,” PandaMonium said. “To share this game with others meant a lot. I’m happy more people are digging into one of the console’s greatest sleeper hits.”
Two week’s into March’s challenge, organizers unlocked the hybrid category, marrying both speed and tricks.
As very much part of that ethos to offer more than a simple score attack, these hybrid categories required competitors to submit both best times and trick score of at least 1,000 points on both the Extreme 01 and Snowboard Park courses.
Double Dime took first place in the hybrid category on the Snowboard Park course with a time of 1 minute, 16.06 seconds.
“The two hybrid challenges were definitely the highlight and probably showed off best what SSS is all about,” he said.
PandaMonium agreed, calling the hybrid category “how SSS was meant to be played.”
“The two core mechanics of the game, doing tricks and going fast, work in harmony here,” he said. “You must be good at both to do well. This means figuring out where you can do good tricks quickly and learn to land them with your board straightened out.”
Double Dime said he joined the challenge organizing committee shortly before the start of March’s contest and was there to help tweak some of the rules and hone the hybrid challenges.
It is that level of attention to detail the committee believes the new schedule will afford.
Double Dime said he is excited for the series’ future.
“I honestly thought these Community Challenges were going to be all Saturn racing games, which I was all for, but was very excited to hear they wanted to feature a variety of lesser known gems from all sorts of genres,” he said.
SHIRO! Discord server member TheNotoriousV.D.P. entered the challenge under the name phuketjumboshrimpbro and earned top marks on the Extreme 01 course in the hybrid category with the fastest time of 1 minute, 9.13 seconds.
Notorious said they have been a Saturn owner since 1996 and participating in the Community Challenges helped them to “relive the excitement of that time, being a teenager with a Next-Gen console.”
“At that time, I did have one other friend who had a Saturn, so there was some community back then, but I was not part of anything like the larger SHIRO! community.” Notorious said. “The competition was fun, but the tangential aspects to the game that we all seemed to gravitate towards, like the Nap on Monday tunes (some participants set their submission videos to), provided different layers of connection to the game and the community.”
Despite picking up the game for the first time for the challenge, Notorious said within a few hours of play, “I broke a world record! PandaMonium helped me post on Speedrun.com.”
“After that, I was hooked for the month and even fired up the game a couple of times since the challenge has concluded just for fun,” Notorious said. “Now I have another game in my collection that I can jump into and enjoy if I have 10-15 minutes of free time, which is a real treasure.”
Details regarding May’s SHIRO! Community Challenge will be made available on the website in a couple weeks. Those seeking to learn more or get in on future challenges are encouraged to join the SHIRO! Discord server.
The full standings for March’s Steep Slope Sliders score and hybrid attack challenges
Cecil H4rvey is a contributor to SHIRO! Media Group, writing stories for the website on NetLink League events. H4rvey cut his teeth on Sega Genesis games as a kid in the ’90s, and his love Sega was reignited like many during the 2020 pandemic, when he discovered the massive amount of innovation in the retro scene. He purchased a model one Japanese Saturn and installed a Fenrir ODE in 2022 and never looked back. H4rvey joined SHIRO! on the heels of a career as a newspaper reporter in the Rocky Mountain West.
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