Giana Sisters
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| Giana Sisters

Amiga gamers and piracy fans may remember Giana Sisters. It first appeared in 1987 and sat nervously on the shelves, glancing sidelong and backing into the shadows, until, after a matter of weeks, Nintendo's snarling legal hounds raced over from Japan and mauled it to death.

It's not hard to see why. Giana Sisters is about a pair of Italian siblings, Giana and Maria, in a cartoon world where power-ups leap from blocks, pipes carry you off to secret worlds, and baddies die when you jump on their heads. If the sisters had married Mario and Luigi, you wouldn't have been able to call it anything other than incest.

Playing Giana Sisters during the early '90s was a revelation. At the time, a playground debate raged over the relative merits of computers and consoles. Nerds vs Gits. I was a Nerd, and I had several games in my arsenal to deploy against the Gits who thought the SNES was a better machine than my Commodore Amiga: Speedball 2, Monkey Island, Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, Knights of the Sky.

Sure, the Gits might have had Super Mario World, but we had Chuck Rock, and that was bound to be just as good.

When somebody palmed me a – whisper it – pirate copy of Giana Sisters, I couldn't have been less impressed. The graphics were charmless, the sound was appalling, and the backstory was drivel. After several hours of play, however, it became clear that Giana Sister had an ace up its sleeve. It was simply awesome. And, more to the point, it was Mario – not even recent Mario, but the one console owners had enjoyed for years – thinly veiled.

Gits 1, Nerds 0.

Back to today, and although there has been a very credible version of Sonic The Hedgehog on the mobile phone, so far Mario has failed to show. So the arrival of the Giana Sisters should be met with some interest. Are we finally getting a Mario of our own?

The object of the game is simply to survive one of Giana's dreams. Each fairly short level comes to an end when you reach the door to the next, and as you tumble along from left to right you can collect coins to gain points and extra lives. There's also a bonus for finishing a level quickly, if accumulating points interests you.

The Giana sisters haven't grown any more attractive in the 20 years since they first sidled onto the scene, and nor has the dream-world they have to traverse. Giana's wild straw hair snakes frenziedly in exactly the way that cartoonists draw the hair of women who are mentally unstable, and Maria's hair is lurid green. Both have the posture of Golem and dress like Ukrainian street walkers. The monsters that populate the levels, meanwhile, are inexplicable blobs.

Beauty isn't everything, though, and Giana Sisters plays better than it looks. Just. Guiding Giana through the levels is like trying to control an endless powerslide. The longer you hold down jump, the higher she goes, and as she descends you can steer her from left to right as though she's parachuting. On the ground, she accelerates incrementally and skids before stopping, so that everything has a fluid, organic feel.

Unfortunately, the bland levels don't provide much of a playground in which to enjoy the movement, and the whole production is so lacklustre that it's difficult to be impressed. Jumping on baddies flattens them silently, without bounce or fanfare, and collecting power-ups fails to produce the bleeping, flashing, trumpeting flourish that it is impossible not to expect.

And that's saddening because there's a kernel of excellent gameplay at the centre of Giana Sisters, but one that is comprehensively muffled by mediocrity.

Giana Sisters is like Mario, yes. An inferior Mario, imitating not the excellent New Super Mario Bros, nor the sublime Super Mario World, but a version from more than 20 years ago, with no attempts to include any of the refinements that the platform genre has enjoyed over the last two decades. Poor show.

Giana Sisters

Having been litigated into obscurity 20 years ago, Giana Sisters is a very dated Mario clone that just manages to be playable, but needs a coat of make-up
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Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.