Planet Bob - Great Giana Sisters

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Hi there!

 

Move Over Brothers, here's the:

 

Great Giana Sisters (1987):

 

 

Programmer: Armin Gessert

Graphics: Manfred Trenz

Musician: Chris Hülsbeck

 

Ratings:

Zzap! Rating: 96%

Lemon64 Rating: 8.5

 

I didn't have Giana Sisters listed in my Rainbow Arts overview article, because I'm not that big a fan of it these days, but since then I came to the conclusion that it's a title which can impossibly be missing in a series of articles about Rainbow Arts games.

 

Giana Sisters IMO marks a turning point in Rainbow Arts Gameography. It is, and I think most C64 fans would agree with that, the first Rainbow Arts game that did not suck.

 

There was only one thing that sold all the early RA games and that was the wonderful music from Chris Hülsbeck. Giana Sisters is no exception in that regard, Chris backed it with yet another masterpiece of SID goodness. Try the Hiscore tune, one of my favourites.

 

Giana Sisters also has graphics made by a certain Manfred Trenz, who's giving his debut here. On a funny sidenote, nobody knew that he could also program - he was hired as an artist. (Manfred Trenz would soon become famous for programming games like Katakis and Turrican )

 

On Giana Sisters, the programmer was still Armin Gessert though, who was working on the two flops "Street Gang" and "In 80 Days Around the World" before that.

 

As for the gamplay itself, I bet everybody immediately guessed it, it's a solid "Super Mario Bros." clone. In fact it was so good, that even Nintendo noticed and forced it off the market

 

If you go deeper in details, Giana has only like 50% of Mario elements though. 3/4 of it are just different levels designed using the elements you find in the first SMB level and every fourth level is a variant of SMBs first underground bowser level. There's no swim levels or autoscrolling levels for example, nothing like the fish-bridges or else that is in later SMB stages. The levels are all good designed though and when I had no SMB to compare it to it didn't really feel repetetive. Giana also has less moves, a fixed size and can't do tricks like kicking turtle shells around.

 

Fun in 2007:

I really loved the punk'd girls back in the day: As a C64 owner it was all I had! Nowadays with SMB1-3 and SMW ready to go anytime I like, there's little to no reason to go back to Giana, besides the music.

 

Greetings,

Manuel

 

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