Giana's Return
Giana's Return | |
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Giana's Return is a fan-made sequel to the videogame The Great Giana Sisters. A German-Austrian-French team, the founders of the independent studio Retroguru in 2011, developed the game from 1998 to 2014.
Plot
One night, while dreaming, Giana returns to the land she had first visited in the original Giana Sisters. She discovers that her sister, Maria, has been captured and brought to this land, and so Giana sets out to free Maria from the monster - known as Swampy - that captured her.
Gameplay
The game is a classic 2D-side-scrolling
The Game is divided into 7 different worlds, each containing 8 levels. Every world ends with a boss fight. Several bonus areas and
Giana can take five hits before being defeated, and while most enemies deduct a single health point upon contact with Giana, bosses will cost her 3 hit points and environmental hazards such as spikes, bottomless pits and fires will instantly cause Giana to lose a life if she is not carrying a power up. After collecting all items without dying she wears a knight armor and will lose only 2 hit points. After every death, Giana spawns at the start of the level. The game has a password system that allows the player to skip to a later level. There is also a level skip program, which is hidden in level one.[4]
The
Much like the
Development
The project began in 1998. The software developer Rainer Sinsch (who used the online pseudonym Myth) won the game-development-event Mekka & Symposium in Bad Fallingbostel (Germany) in the 32K-competition with his remake of The Great Giana Sisters known as Giana 32K which he created over a period of three days. This game contained only seven levels.[6] Here he first met the man who would later become the head of the Giana’s Return project, Shahzad Sahaib (who was known as Kojote).
Together they formed a team that developed The Great Giana Worlds, a game for Windows computers with DirectX-support, that was presented in 1999 at Evoke, one of the largest demopartys held annually in Germany. By releases onto different computermagazine-CDs in Germany the game was quite famous within a short time.[7][8] Because of this, the copyright owner of the original game, Armin Gessert, threatened to sue the team. He dropped the threat after the team renamed their project Gaint Worlds, but Myth had lost interest in the project.[9]
In order to continue development Kojote, who had been the level designer on Giana Worlds, brought together a new team.[10] Work with the new coder, known as CHN, started at the end of 2001. In 2004 the beta version of Giana's Return was completed. CHN then abandoned the project and did not leave behind any code for the team to work off of.[11]
The project began anew in 2004 with another coder, Rodolphe Boixel (known as Thor), but in 2008 the project was almost cancelled yet again.
Around this time, some of the game's graphic designers left the team without warning, further delaying the game's release. Giana's Return version 0.99 was finally released with the presentation at the Swiss Buenzli 18 on 15 August 2009. Version 1.0 was released in 2011, and a patch, v1.1, was added in 2014.[15][16]
References
- ^ a b Downloads Website of Giana’s Return
- ^ Giana's Return - Jump'n'Run für Retrofreunde pcspielekompass.de 25 March 2010
- ^ Giana's Return chip.de, 15 October 2015
- ^ Giana´s Return: Mario v sukni root.cz, 22 April 2011
- ^ Test de Giana's Return obligement.free.fr, 2010
- ^ mekka & symposium Archived 11 May 2015 at the Wayback Machine website of the competition, 1998
- ^ Retro Hunter #17 interview with Kojote
- ^ Review: The Great Giana Worlds scene.org
- ^ "Giana Sisters"-Fortsetzung als Gratis-Game Kronen Zeitung, 17 August 2009
- ^ a b Light into the dark? the development-timeline, website of Giana’s Return
- ^ Giana's Return Archived 30 July 2018 at the Wayback Machine CHN-website
- ^ The Great Giana Sisters: Giana’s Return Archived 12 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine superlevel.de, 16 August 2009
- ^ Interview with Kojote superlevel.de
- ^ Keine Iphone-App! Website of Giana's Return
- ^ Forum entry of Kojote Open-Handheld-Forum
- ^ Giana's Return v0.99-bnz18 (Win32 Release) Release 2009