The SHIRO! Community Battles Through the Eurasian Conflict This July!

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 !

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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. 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:
• 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 .

	Rasputin3000
		Archaeologist of many things. Longtime enjoyer of the Dreamcast that found his way to the Saturn in 2016 thanks to its vibrant fan community.