The Great Giana Sisters - NNRG Week 48 

I've been binge-watching these C64 videos, really enjoying them! A lot of the games I know from growing up, but back then we often didn't get very far past the intro screens and first level because of lack of instructions and / or smarts...

From what I've heard there was no actual lawsuit just Nintendo leaning hard on retailers to not stock the game. Also Nintendo never really had anything against the series as a concept merely the obvious fact that this game blatantly plagiarized the Super Mario Bros tileset. The modern games (Giana Sisters DS and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams) had original assets so Nintendo was perfectly happy having them on their systems. Giana Sisters DS even includes a copy of all this game's level layouts as they were entirely original work. The level designer for this game was actually very annoyed at the plagiarized tilesets because it made people think he plagiarized the level layouts as well when he very much did not.

“Maria Maria?” “No, Maria Gianna!”

Hoo boi. I'm prepared to get roasted. I grew up on Giana and loved them to bits over the Marios. But there's no denying that the Giana Sisters game isn't...great. It's a clunky-ass platformer at best. I still loved it though, and nostalgia is strong. The reason the enemy got you, btw, was because you landed on the tile in front of it, and the enemy walked into your sprite. Very subtle, but it actually hit you from the side, rather than you landing on top of it. The joys of wonky hitboxes. If anyone wants a really GOOD Giana Sisters experience in the modern age, I highly recommend Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams (and the expansion). It is a really, really good Giana-themed platformer with honestly pretty high difficulty and collect-a-thon elements. It's a hella lot of fun.

6:40 - Super Mario Land for Game Boy came out with the Game Boy's release in 1989. Great Giana Sisters came out in 1987. For comparison, Super Mario _Bros_ came out in 1985 in Japan, 1986 in North America, and 1987 in Europe. Great Giana Sisters *BEAT SUPER MARIO BROS TO MARKET* in Europe by a week!

Good review and this is one of my favorite games on the C64 and like you, my first experience with it was the Super Mario Bros graphics hack. Some more interesting things about this game that you didn't note in your review: 1. There are warps spread out through the game (on levels 3, 9, etc...) making it VERY easy to get to the final level (32). These are typically activated by hitting a secret block or dropping through the floor. For example, at the start of level 3, when you are on the ground and there is a platform up high, between the second and third coin box is a warp block. 2. There are areas where you can fall through the floor to be taken to coin rooms (similar to the original Super Mario Bros when you go down pipes). You can see them on screen with blue squiggly lines at the bottom. 3. Nintendo's stance on this game has softened over the years as there is a version of Great Gianna Sisters for the Nintendo DS. Pretty solid remake of the original game with improved graphics similar to New Super Mario Bros. 4. It's possible to play linearly through this entire game in under an hour (I've done it many times) and to me at least, it's got decent replay value.

I first learned of this game from LGR's video about the Christmas version, which he made (oh god) twelve years ago.

One thing that you apparently missed is that some of the pits aren't death - if there's a squiggly line in them (such as the one at 14:25), you go to a small bonus screen. Exactly like the pipes you can go down in the Mario games.

Hell yeah! Just remembered the Amiga version yesterday and watched a speedrun. Chris Hülsbeck is a musical genius.

Apparently, the UK release had a slogan "The Brothers are History" on the game cover which perhaps was partially a blame for the game's early removal from commercial distribution. "...following the British release of the game, Rainbow Arts received a what he described as a "nasty letter" from Nintendo and that there was no formal legal action, but only a warning to take the game off the market. Darran Jones in Retro Gamer wrote that following the game being pulled from store shelves, it only grew in popularity with Trenz recalling that the game only received a wider audience after it became commercially unavailable."

Who remembers that Quake mod?

The only version of this game I played was the version where they swapped in Mario. You know, I never knew about Bowser turning out to be regular enemies until later. Since I don't think I've ever used the fire balls on Bowser.

This is what I grew up with, I played this before I played Mario :D I loved this game, I still do, the music is just so goddamn good :D This is probably also one of the very first games I ever played back in the beginning of the 90s.

Oh, seeing it ... reminds me ... that crab in the second stage is the crab from Super Pipeline II ! ... oh, apparently there's several enemies from SP2! I forgot!

The modern games were actually quite good, although the later ones got really hard.

I vaguely remember there being a level editor for this game for Windows though unsure if it was just editing C64 ROM of the game or had reimplemented it on Windows.

Thanks for the revie, but please focus on the music more! There are entire radio stations playing chris huelsbeck remixes to this day.

Thanks for keeping on keeping on. :) (This is also so I can throw engagement points with your name on it at the algorithm beast)

The Mario Mario and Luigi Mario quirk is only from the live action movie. In the games Mario and Luigi don't have last names.

This is one those that we used Action Replay on and swapped sprites on the fly, good times.

in Level 5, in the first pit there is a line. There is a bonus area in there. You will see other spots with the same line.

It's pronounced gee-anna, Italian name like Mario. Back in the 80s there was a very popular singer called Gianna Nannini, I wonder if she inspired the name somehow

Answering the question of whether you'd use a bomb or clock when hitting space: When you get the bomb it takes place of the clock. I'm not sure if water replaced the bomb, since it was a passive powerup. But getting the 1-up would take away the clock,bomb and water drop. So I tended to avoid the lollipop to hold on to the fire immunity. Also, some of the warp blocks were in the way. I'm surprised you didn't hit it by accident in level 7 Level 3: At the start of the level under the last of the blocks near the top of the screen, can accidentally hit it if you jump for the next platform a bit too early. Level 7: Slightly to the right of center of the crumbly floor after the small island with all the special blocks... I kept hitting it because I jumped too early, worrying that running on the crumbly blocks might disappear faster than I ran.

Hey, I sent you a nomination for this one too. Did that get lost in the shuffle?

Honestly, Hudson Hawk has a little bit more going on than this game, made by a more experienced Ocean and ported to the NES. It's orange, but it's good! For the C64. Remember that the 64 games use half the resolution of the Spectrum to get the 4 colours per character mode and hardware sprites from it's bad colour selections.

Great game and music

The physics of Super Mario Land fireballs had more to do with a different team working on the game. (R&D 1 vs. EAD) At the time, Mario was seen as a character that could be freely used across different games. The problem was that the physics and design of Mario Land caused some pushback that resulted in R&D 1 returning to Mario basics in SML2.

While I played first and loved SMB, TGGS has a place in my nostalgic heart. Always loved the music and the overall gameplay for the C64. I understand the big N for being upset, but I think nowadays this game is somewhat a "cult classic" or something like that.

Fun fact: I had a Commodore when I was little, as perhaps my first (own) gaming PC. And yet I don't think that I heard at all of the Giana Sisters until relatively recent years! As to the game, it actually looks pretty decent to me! Okay, it's a pretty blatant rip-off of Mario Bros.--but it does just enough of its own thing that it nevertheless feels somewhat fresh to me. And, as noted, the gameplay seems--if not amazing--good. ^_^ (PS: In the docs, I suspect that they may have intended the other pronunciation of "route" (i.e. to sound like "root"), as that would cause it to rhyme with "fruit" earlier in the sentence.)

i always promised it "Giana"

Blatant clone but also one of the best games on the system.

Wait... at 5:39... did they misspell "Giana" as "Gianna" in the title screen? That must be where the missing N from the Millennium title screen has gone to (where they spell it "Milenium").

The old Abyss hack pretty much just swapped out the sprites for sprites ripped from the Atarisoft Mario Bros, and put Mario's name in it

It does look like Mario, but if you want underground brick tunnels in your 8-bit platformer, or a “fantasy” environment, with big mushrooms, green fields, blue sky and clouds, all tropes that Nintendo didn’t invent, it must be quite difficult NOT to make it look like Mario. When you consider the limited colour palette and resolution, there’s only so much you can do to differentiate. As long as they’re not ripping off the assets one for one and branding it as a Mario game, seems fair to me.

I thought C64 games can't play sound effects & music at the same time :o but then again I didn't grow up with a C64

The c64 graphics always had a brown tint. I don't really like it. I wanted a c64 but I see that the vic20 graphics were colourful and not brown so I would have been disappointed upgrading from that

Ooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! And a WHOPPING 58%, too! :D

Giana is probably the most famous C64 game, but it hasn't exactly had a remarkable legacy, having fallen into the pits of "attempting to cash in on the nostalgia of an inferior product" that befell Bubsy, and most has-been platformers. The first revival game was good, but the second didn't do so hot it seems. And this game suffers the Gradius problem, I see; while also being too long.