The Great Giana Sisters

Title		The Great Giana SistersFlood
Game Type       Platform
Company		Rainbird
Players		1 or 2
Compatibility	A500
HD Installable	No
Submission	Even Sandvik Underlid

I tried, I failed, I gave up. Trying to write a review of The Great Giana
Sisters without mentioning Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers is a close-to-
impossible task. Ignoring the Giana Sisters' similarities in concept,
visuals and gameplay to the Nintendo classic would be to ignore what this
game originally became famous for; being a Mario rip-off - and a bloody
enjoyable one at that.

The Great Giana Sisters is a well done game. Amazingly well done. In fact,
so well done that Nintendo had to force the authors of this Commodore 64 /
Amiga classic to stop commercial distribution of the game. Why buy a
Nintendo console when you could have just as much fun playing Giana
Sisters on the home computer already sitting beneath the TV set in your
living room?

Did Nintendo's actions help? The Great Giana Sisters still got hundreds of
thousands of fans living all over the world, with the only difference from
a commercially available game being that they had to  pirate it instead of
buying it.

Back in the eighties when the game was first released, The Great Giana
Sisters was nothing particulary impressive technically. Compared to
today's offerings, the game looks somewhat dated. GGS is a 2D scrolling
platformer with relatively simple 32 colour graphics. The sprites and even
some of the levels are strikingly similar to the more famous Nintendo
classic. Both games feature a total of 32 levels, non-simulatanious
two-player options and a simple sideway-scrolling game engine.

Not even seen Super Mario Bros? Surely everyone have seen Super Mario
Bros, but anyway, here goes: You control a small character who can jump on
platforms, knock down brick walls by breaking them with their head, collect
bonuses, defeat cute, unintelligent enemies by landing on their head,
collect extras that enable you to fire small shots at your enemies and
give you other abilities - what more is there to say?

Obviously there are also certain differences between Super Mario Bros and
the Great Giana Sisters. Except for different storylines and smaller
visual differences, the control method is slightly different. Giana
Sisters lacks a 'run' option, and when you enhance the main characters'
abilities by collecting a magic ball (equal to the mushrooms in Mario's
game) you still die immediately when running into an enemy or jumping on a
spike, instead of first simply losing the extra abilities. Personally, I
feel that these changes add to more to the game than they subtract, but I
know there are people who disagree.

I have overheard discussions of which game is the better - held on an
almost academic level between people participating on demo / LAN-parties.
Even non-computer-game-players often understand how people / computer
geeks like me get addicted to and involved in complex games like
Civilization or Frontier, but I hardly have a problem admitting that
emotional advocacy over a simple platform game can appear a bit strange to
outsiders ...

There are tons of platform games on the Amiga with better graphics and
more complex gameplay than The Great Giana Sisters, but very few have that
special "it" that makes you want to play the game over and over again.
Maybe what makes the game so special is its' simplicity. Varied maybe,
and certainly challenging, but there are no adventure, strategy or puzzle
elements thrown in there. In my opinion, if the core game is addictive
enough itself, there is no need to add extras like that.

When I was about seven or eight years old I pretty much fell in love with
the main character in Giana Sisters', having played the game for a few
hours on a friend's Commodore 64. Not only that, but I became completely
addicted to the game itself. The bleepy melodies of the intro screen and
in-game music (that both feel a bit annoying these days, even though I
admit they give me certain nostalgic chills) added to the atmosphere, and
the hidden level warp options represented a way for even relatively poor
gamers like myself to get near the end of the game.

People who are not diehard fans of the game can safely ignore the next
paragraph. It will only bore you.

The Commodore 64 version of the game is, in my opinion, slightly better
than the Amiga version. Graphics are of a slightly lower resolution and
the colours a bit more jerky, but there is more animation, you have a tad
better control of the game character and the SID music adds to the
atmosphere of the game in its' own peculiar way. And I never got the
'ARMN' (press those letters at the same time while playing the game) level
cheat to work on the Amiga despite reports saying that it works well ...

Unless you have an Amiga porky enough to emulate the C64 100% accurately
and at a 1/1 framerate, or have a C64 / 128 still around, don't spend your
time trying to get hold of the C64 files, though. Having to choose between
the two versions is only a problem of luxury - they are both addictive and
challenging games.

For grown up computer geeks of today, the Giana Sisters might appear as
nothing special but a pretty good platformer. For those of us who grew up
with the title, it represents something very special. Not only is it one
of the titles that gives the strongest nostalgic feelings, it is also one
of the few of the really old titles that still gives me the desire for more
every time I take it out of the closet and give it a shot.

The Giana Sisters has not lost its' appeal. Play it.

NEWSFLASH: Epic Marketing has just released the 'Giana Sisters Trilogy', a
Amiga CD-ROM disc containing the original game as well as the slightly
dodgy sequel Hard n' Heavy (and probably another game that has something
to do with Giana Sisters, since it is supposed to be a 'trilogy'). Get a
copy now, before they get sued by Nintendo. ;)

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