We interrupt your regularly scheduled program to bring you this month's edition of RF Generation's Site News!  In this issue, we drum up some excitement for our annual Pain Yourself With Submissions contest, announce July's community playthrough game, provide you with the latest details for Retro World Expo 2017, and of course, thank those members who sent in submissions to our site and registered approvals during the month of May. However, in an effort to increase the amount of info and appearance of our database, we will be implementing a new "focus" each month. Stay tuned to the end of our broadcast, for more information.  Thanks for tuning in!     

REMEMBER: If you have any news about upcoming events or topics that you think the site needs to hear about, please PM singlebanana and put "RFG Site News" in the subject line.  Who knows, maybe your news will make our front page!
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Those of you old timers know that we have an annual tradition here at RF Generation called the PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS CONTEST and this year, the month of July will mark the start and finish of this year's event. As all of you know, member submissions are what keeps this site going and ensures that we have the most up-to-date and best video game database on the Interwobz. To commemorate our anniversary, we hold an annual contest to see who can "contribute" the most to the site  during an allotted period of time (*see the description of contributions and points below).

So, here's how it works. From July 1st until July 31st, you make as many submissions as humanly possible. Our dedicated database staff will review the absurd amount of submissions, and at the end of it all, one of you gets a super sweet prize package, which includes your choice of $60 worth of gaming goodness. Essentially, you win a shopping spree (not to exceed $60 and items have to be game related) on GameGavel, eBay, or Amazon, and we pick up the tab. Of course, you'll also be the coolest kid in town as you strut around in your new, official RF Generation Ringer T-shirt.

Submission Types, Point Breakdowns & Rules

Here's how the point breakdown will work:
  Title Addition: 5 Points
   Variation Addition: 6 Points
   Page Edit*: 2 Points
   Review*: 50 Points
   Overview*: 20 Points
   Image Upload: 10 Points
   Submission Review**: 1 Point
   Blog Post*: 30 Points
   Blog Comment: 1 Point
   Forum Post: 1 Point
   Forum Karma: See Explanation

*Regarding the asterisk: For page edits, if it is noticed that you are consistently only adding one field per edit multiple times for a single title just to up your points, you will be disqualified. Any review or overview completed will count as a page edit as well the points for an overview or review. To get the points for an overview or review you MUST contact Shadow Kisuragi via Personal Message so that he can keep a tally. In addition, the review or overview must be on the actual game / hardware page. A review or overview of poor quality could result in less points than stated being granted. The same statement holds true for blog posts.

Regarding Forum Karma: Because we want the forum to be a lively place of fun and interesting posts, we're enabling Karma during this contest. Karma rewards members that make good posts and smites those who do not. Your Karma will play a wildcard role in posts. Positive Karma at the end of the contest will increase your point total by a factor, while negative karma will decrease it. Please note that Karma may be disabled if it's being abused. Please be honest and fair in your karma assessments.

As with any contest, there is fine print. Any submission that you make must adhere to the RF Generation Policies and Guidelines. These policies and guidelines were written for a reason, and well, we'd like everyone to adhere to them. Failure to adhere to the guidelines could result in a disqualification.

Any point reduction or disqualification can be contested. In the event that you wish to contest, you must explain why the reduction or disqualification is unfair.

Since staff members can earn a point for each submission review that non-approvers cannot, and those staff members will have thousands of submissions to review in addition to their own, their total score will be halved to make things a bit more fair and lively.

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This July, the Community Playthrough team returns to play the sequel to one of our most successful and beloved community playthroughs from May 2015, Shining Force II.  This epic, tactical RPG is considered by some as an improvement on it's predecessor, but it's going to take a lot of good gameplay and storylines to convince this tough audience who raved over the original.  Be warned that Shining Force II has a little longer run time (approximately 30+ hours) and shelling out the cash for an original Genesis copy can really hurt your wallet.  However, I'm happy to announce that this game can be found much cheaper on the Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection for PS3 and 360, on the Wii Virtual Console, and on Steam.  The time is right for a nice, lazy summer RPG. The only question is, "Are you up to the challenge?"

For those of you who did not play the original, you may be glad to know that Shining Force II's storyline is not directly connected. The bridge that connects the two games being Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict developed for the Game Gear.

Our story begins in a shrine south of Granseal Castle, where a thief named Slade unwittingly breaks the power of a magic seal by stealing the jewels of Light and Darkness.  His actions unseal the Demon King Zeon trapped within. The following day, King Granseal falls sick after being attacked by an unknown creature. Sir Astral, the court's advisor, along with his apprentices, Bowie the squire, Sarah the healer and Chester the knight, investigate these events at the castle and find that the door to the Tower of Ancients stands open....

We hope that you are as excited about this pick as we are, so be sure to grab yourself a copy today! Also, please join in to discuss the game by signing up on our Shining Force II discussion thread located HERE.

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Early bird ticket sales for both days of the event at the $35 price mark have expired; however, don't fret, as you can still save by getting your tickets for $40 through September 30th!  This is the event that you will want to come to, since our site is a sponsor, and you will also get to many of our loyal site members.  Several members who will be in attendance so far include: the Collectorcast's Duke.Togo, wildbil52, and Crabmaster2000, the loveable russlyman, JerryGreenwood, bickman2k, and yours truly, singlebanana.  Tickets can be purchased HERE.

Be sure to stay tuned to Retro World Expo's homepage, as special guest announcements should be revealed soon!

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Before I get into our numbers for last month, I would like to discuss a special monthly event that I would like to tie in to our submissions.  After looking over the database and having a discussion with our Database Director, it has come to my attention that we are missing many scans from the most recent generations of games (games, boxes, screenshots, and instructions...if there are any).  We would like for each month to have a specific focus so that we can drive toward making certain areas of our database more appealing and informative.  This does not mean that you can only scan things under this focus, but just that we hope you will check your personal collections for scans we may be missing for each specific focus and that you scan and submit them during that month.  For June, I thought it might be nice to start with the Nintendo DS. This seems to be a handheld with a great number and variety of games, and a piece of software that we are missing lots of scans for. Thanks in advance for your efforts and if we can determine some way to start tracking these numbers, we may try to hand out some rewards in the future.

In May, site members contributed a total of 1,961 submissions to our database!  Of these additions, 1,873 were game submissions and 88 were hardware items. Of this total, 893 contributions were new images and 832 of these images were game submissions. A big thanks to all who submitted items to our database and to those who reviewed them all for the month of May 2017! We appreciate your efforts and are happy to see our database's continual growth from month to month.

Our top submitters (those with a minimum of 50) for May were:

Kam1Kaz3 NL77                  402
kaysow                                304
toze3                                   277
ApolloBoy                            216
Schlibby                              189
Bear78                                  91
Raidou                                  56

Thanks for another great month! 

Top approvers for the month included:

Schlibby                             575
Shadow Kisuragi                300
Fleabitten                           124
FatherJack                         104
Apolloboy                             35

Great work everyone!  Let's keep those submissions coming and keep in mind our special focus on the Nintendo DS! 

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