The SegaXtreme Sega Saturn 30th Anniversary Game Competition saw an impressive nine submissions in the “Original Games” category, and SHIRO! intends to shine a light on each of these.
Today we are looking at two entries, MOAI talks and Haiku.
MOAI talks
This interactive tech demo was developed by Team-Starlane, self-described as a “loose consolidation of Sega Saturn homebrew devs” spearheaded by Xenos (aka Xenos-Interactive), as well as Reye (aka SuperReye or ReyeMe).
The demo features a 3D-modeled Moai head, inspired by the real-life megalithic sculptures carved by the ancient inhabitants of Rapa Nui, which showcases lip animations that respond to player input. The lip-syncing was confirmed by Reye on the SegaXtreme forum:
“MOAI has a really nice 3D model and lip animations for Sega Saturn. Is the lip movement dynamically generated from the sound?” — Tails of Saturn
“yes, it moves the mouth based on the sound” — SuperReye
The player is given three input options in the demo, those tied to the A, B, and C buttons. The A button results in a low “MOAAAAAA” sound. A press of the B button results in an often-meme’d monologue by Dagoth Ur of the Elder Scrolls franchise. The C button displays the creator credits and the origins of the model and sounds contained in the demo.
Xenos was the concept designer and project organizer behind the homebrew title Blue Skies as well as an author for the Programming-for-Beginners-on-Saturn Jo-Engine software development kit GitHub repository.
Reye has been a consistent competitor in the Saturn Anniversary Competition, with original homebrew efforts including Sky Blaster, Tank game, and Utenyaa~. Reye also assisted the prolific homebrew developer vbt on projects like wolf4sdl (Wolfenstein 3D for Saturn).
HAIKU
Submitted by Nova, Haiku features a static image, composed of a central, blue-grey mouse sprite displayed via VDP 1 and a background, VDP 2 layer containing the titular haiku:
I ran out of time,
Inexperience cost me.
Instead enjoy this.
The background image also contains a black mouse — named Saturn — and the “Soup Wizard” cat.
Nova (aka Neowatt) explains in a .txt document that accompanies the game’s .iso file — see full text below — that she had no previous coding experience making Haiku her developer debut. You can download Haiku for yourself here.
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