| Credits | |||||||||||
| Published: |
1988, Rainbow Arts
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| Developer: |   | ||||||||||
| Coder: | Thomas Hertzler | ||||||||||
| Graphics: | Manfred Trenz | ||||||||||
| Musician: | Chris Hülsbeck | ||||||||||
| Information | |||||||||||
| Hardware: | OCS | ||||||||||
| Disks: | 1 | ||||||||||
| License: | Commercial | ||||||||||
| Language: | English | ||||||||||
| Players: | 1 or 2 | ||||||||||
| Orig. Price: | £24.99 | ||||||||||
| Relationship: | Precursor to Hard 'n' Heavy  | ||||||||||
| Categorization | |||||||||||
| Genre: | Platformer | ||||||||||
| Subgenre: | Scrolling Screen | ||||||||||
| Tags: | bugs, jumpnrun, monster, owls, platform, sideways, stomp | ||||||||||
| Magazine Reviews | |||||||||||
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Added by Kim Lemon on Jun 28, 2004. Viewed 84387 times.
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I've played it a few times and I don't really see the attraction. Is it just popular because of its mythical status? It's pretty average.
View all comments (51)
Giana Sisters (GS) is strong inspired by Super Mario Bros (SMB), but it is not a 100% clone, not close! You will get with GS a fast paced and solid straight Jump & Run game worth playing. Its definitly a good game, even when the idea was ripped of, Clearly a 7 out of 10! Rating it "Pure Crab" (1) or even below average (4) is ridiculous. (Can you read: 'Give your objective vote'). Eat it or die, Loosers and Lamers!
View all comments (1)
Not a patch on the eight bit version but still one of the more playable platformers and its sticking a middle finger to Nintendo, which is always to be applauded.
View all comments (212)
The poor man SMB. PLays like a brick and it's quite barebone compared to wht made the original game so successful. The only thing standing here is the music.
Overall it's a poor rip off which is pretty pathetic and laughable compared to the original source material.
View all comments (25)
People compare it to Super Mario Bros. I think that is a wrong way of thinking. While clearly inspired it is a different game. I would look at the first levels as a nod to Nintendo, like showing some love for their game. I really enjoy GG for the game that it is. It is really enjoyable.
View all comments (2)
It's overrated for sure. Not bad but a poor man's Mario clone in the end.
View all comments (116)
This game became so popular that it gave birth to countless adaptations, has been remade to death for numerous other platforms and is still seeing SEQUELS being produced and SELLING for modern platforms to this very day.
Didn't you hear? "The brothers are history!" He he he...
View all comments (42)
Great Giana Sisters for Amiga is a dissapointment. Yes, it is somehow nice to play. But from the techincal side it is just crap: Ok, i have to admit, music is quite nice. But extremly repetetive. Sound fx is a bit weird. Some bad sampled tones, riffs and what ever. Level design is really 1980 - ok. Mario a that time wasn't better. But the visual style was ...cheap. Make a side by side comparison with the C64 version. Maybe the C64 version lacks of colors and looks a little bit bleached. But it has some kind of paralax! And then the developer could bring this baby to a modern and powerful computer: The Amiga! And what did they do? A "it feels like Amos" Game. So much opportunities - wasted.
This game is not bad, as someone could think reading the section above. But it isn't good. It's far from it. It is a medicore game with a really bad presentation, awful sound effects, repetetive music and boring level design. Well, and even dead ends. It is awful to realize, when you get stuck in the underground levels and have to wait till the timer runs out.
But it has many secrets (warp zones), an unforgettable scream when giana (or her sis) dies, it was an early title on the Amiga, it has this "it was my first game i ever played"-charm.
For me it is a 4. It's ok, but it aged bad. Try better games instead. Leave this for "collection" purposes.
View all comments (142)
Of course this doesn't show what the Amiga was capable of at all; it looks and sounds like an 8-bit game. I found it laughable when I first played it.
And it is not as good as the game it sought to clone.
And yet, so good was the source material that even this poor man's Mario ended up being curiously more-ish (at least, if you weren't lucky enough to own a NES to complement your Amiga). Level design features such as running along the blocks at the top of the screen on level 2 were still fun, even if they were shamelessly ripped off.
View all comments (95)
A complete disaster
On Amiga as on C64, If you think it's as well done and playable as the original, then you've never played Super Mario Bros on NES. Great Giana Sister is the perfect example of the bad game designed in the belief that a piece of code and some graphics can make a good platformer. Today we know full well that a title like Super Mario Bros is the result of the hard work of a team of video game designers, that nothing has been left to chance, and that its global success is fully justified. What pride from the future Factor 5 team!
Forget the sisters, there are so many good platform games on Amiga, do not even try it, you'll be adviced
View all comments (144)
An overrated platformer which showcases none of the fun, depth and ingenious level design of its main japanese inspiration. Still kind of fun for a couple levels but there's so many better games in the genre on the Amiga...
Two years later Manfred Trenz would actually set the bar much higher with the legendary Turrican, a perfect example of how digesting one's gaming influence and come up with a game leading the competiton (Turrican would eventually be ported on all major consoles at the time).
View all comments (119)
Never liked this. Looks and plays like crap. Maybe it was great on C64, but the Amiga version simply sucks. How can anyone even compare this disaster to Mario Bros?
View all comments (29)
Suffers from heavy inertia, but quite good for 1988.
View all comments (123)
Giana belongs to C64. Playing it on Amiga is similar as killing a fly with a gun. Anyway, it's still fun
View all comments (115)
A game like this, aiming to replicate the 1985 Super Mario Bros on the european home computer scene, was already outdated in 1988 when it got released. On the other hand, it did not fail at capturing the spirit of the japanese jump and run and was very playable. That, along with being probably the only computer game of this genre at release, has given the game its cult status. The Amiga version is not the best around (that would be the C64 one) but it still offers a fun, albeit limited, platforming experience. Very memorable and early Huelsbeck music here (6/10).
View all comments (212)
Mario on Amiga! AWESOME.
View all comments (7)
Conversion is too faithful to C64 thus it makes it a bit "odd". Controls are sluggish making this game very difficult to play.
View all comments (899)
The Amazingly Bad Giana Sisters !
- Bad Graphics
- Bad Music
- Sluggish Controls
Extremely Boring !
1/10
View all comments (2)
I found this absolutely repulsive. Uninteresting, ugly, uninspired, ripped-off and tedious to the extreme. Deary me. 1/10 from me.
View all comments (24)
Great old-school platform, serving cold hand on the joystick to proceed Giana Sisters. Historical!
View all comments (102)
Only interesting because of the lawsuit affair with nintendo.
I never got why so many people kept on playing it over and over again.
Sluggish controls, bad level design, horrible graphics ...
The only remarkable thing was the music and I think many just played it because of the picture of the girl on the front screen ...
I didn't like it that much. The GBA remake or the free downloadable version for windows is nice for historical reasons though. And your girlfriends will like them too!!!
View all comments (165)
How to play mario (for amiga people like me ) step 1. Turn the amiga off. Step 2. Throw the disk in the bin. Step 3. Play mario.
View all comments (28)
Please retrogamers, don't think AMIGA has nothing more to offer than this crap copy of Mario Bros, just interesting for nostalgics. Maybe cute on C64, but really poor on a 16/32bits computer ! Uninspired character, 8bits graphics, inappropriate soundtrack and most of all, the gameplay is awful ! Nothing can save Giana from the sinking today, I'm afraid. Sorry for Giana's lovers, but a little bit of objectivity is necessary here
View all comments (144)
Never really understood the whole fuss with this. Got it due to popular demand (everyone said it was soooo great) but once I got it I quickly discovered that it was sub-standard even in comparison to the one game that this blatantly copied.
Average mario-esque platformer with worse animation, worse graphics, worse level design, worse controls... Alas, it's all just worse.
Talk about something being waaay over-hyped...
View all comments (211)
The Great Giana Sisters : Super Mario Brothers :: Katakis : R-Type
View all comments (99)
A game you don't have to feel bad about pirating. It's Super Mario Bros with less competent graphics, music, controls, art, and design. Rainbow Arts even shamelessly copied the first levels screen by screen. Playing The Great Giana Sisters makes me feel dirty.
View all comments (1096)
I don't have anything against this one. On the Amiga, it's interesting to play an 8 bit game like this--though the controls on the Amiga are faster than playing the same game on the C=64.
I like the music on both--the Amiga music has the same tempo, and similar up-beat tune. This one's fun for awhile and easy to play.
View all comments (223)
A true classic. It was also one of the first games I "owned" (in truth I didn't own it, I got a copy).
It was basically a rip-off of Mario Bros. Today such rip-offs are evry common but back then it meant a lawsuit by Nintendo.
In tuth, the game has enough differences to count as an original game, in my opinion. And fact is, that it has great level design and very tight gameplay. Add to that awesome music and you have a winner.
View all comments (51)
Great game classic, one of the games I've played the most. Yeah it's a mario clone, but it was all we amigo's had, if we didn't own a Nes. I never got the cheat to work on Amiga, tried every combo of A R M I N, typing one letter at a time, holding them all down etc. Small caps, big caps - you name it.
After 20+ years I've found out how to use the items:
BOMB = press and hold fire, move joy to Right Bottom diagonal. Direction: ( \ )
CLOCK = press and hold fire, move joy to Left Bottom diagonal. Direction: ( / )
more: [www]
View all comments (4)
Great Giana Sisters. In fact ist is a clone but despite the fact of being copied we loved the game aud played it over and over again. Being removed from the market is the major fact why everybody I knew wanted to have Giana Sister (mostly on the C64). It is a clone with no outstanding music or graphics but ... It is Giana.
View all comments (28)
Notorious for being banned in the wake of a Nintendo lawsuit, Great Giana Sisters is a platformer with an identity problem. It looks for all the world like Super Mario Bros - but it's Super Mario Bros filtered through the imagination of a four year old with a defective memory and poor motor skills.
Despite working with the best source material available, GGS just wasn't up to scratch. The team at Time Warp might have done a so-so job of capturing SMB's basic mechanics but they just couldn't replicate the feel of the original game, or the attention to detail that went into it's level design. Oh, and the graphics look like something out of a PD effort circa 1986. Overall an interesting curio but not a very interesting game.
4/10
View all comments (24)
Simple gfx and sound, but classic simple gameplay! I love the fact that it was pulled from sale almost immediately for been such a blatant rip off of Mario, and yet everyone seemed to have a copy of this game! If nintendo hadn't bared its sale, it probably would have been nothing more than a poor rip off... But because of its legal history, its some what of a cult classic as its one of those games we should have never got... But we did
View all comments (178)
I have no idea why this soulless, plagiaristic rip-off of a game is so popular. While it might have done a half-decent job of bringing a rather unpolished version of Super Mario Bros. to the C64, the barely-updated graphics in the Amiga port are inexcusable. In many ways it actually looks worse than the original Super Mario Bros. - a game released three years earlier on an 8-bit platform designed in 1983!
So, this game is a carbon copy of Super Mario Bros, only with worse graphics, worse level designs - the ones that weren't stolen, that is - and an absolutely hideous main character. And, while the C64 version had great music - in many ways better than that in Super Mario Bros. - courtesy of Chris Hülsbeck, the songs in the Amiga version are completely ruined by their horrible instrument samples.
Words can't express my disgust for the praise that this Chinese bootleg-style knockoff of Super Mario Bros. still recieves to this day. Besides, if you must play a bastardized Amiga version of a console hit, you could at least show some taste and play Kid Chaos, which actually bothers to look and sound like a proper 16-bit game.
View all comments (141)
Of course it's a "Super Mario"-clone but a truly great one! Sure, the graphics are nothing special but the leveldesign is outstanding. Combine this with a truly great soundtrack by Chris Hülsbeck and you got an all-time classic.
View all comments (51)
Crappy overrated boring mario clone. Thats all what i see here ...
View all comments (35)
I loved this game, and especially the music... (I never played Super Mario, so it is well possible that it is just a cheap ripoff etc. But still, I loved it.)
View all comments (23)
I cannot understand why people like this game. It's boring and graphics are awful. Crap.
View all comments (22)
Ehm, the graphics look like on the C64 and the music could not match the C64 version... But surely a nice game for those who did not have a C64
View all comments (48)
Obviously a Super Mario Bros clone but this is excellent. For some reason I also liked the C64 version slightly better. But this version is excellent aswell.
View all comments (29)
This game sucks
View all comments (31)
Mario rip off.. But a damned good one (the C64 version I preferred over the official Mario game at the time.)
View all comments (8)
This is the game I grew up with! I played it through more than 100 times! Awesome! (90%)
View all comments (61)
Great game, but more work could have been put into this conversion. It offers nothing more than the C64 version, and the music is A LOT better on the C64.
View all comments (210)
If you had a monitor with the green phosphors option like the Philips CM 8833, you could swith on the green phosphors during the title screen and see the nipples of the girl
View all comments (206)
The Great Giana Sisters is without any doubt one of the greatest games ever made despite the fact that it's a Super Mario Bros. Clone. The Amiga game is pretty great though it's effortlessly converted, so I like the C64 game better. Still a great anyways.
View all comments (50)
This game gets a 10 because w kid knows what a kid wants and I spent most of my time on this game. Sure Flashbacks cooler but i'll give that a 10 too
View all comments (1)
No question, this game is cool, but mainly on the C64. The Amiga conversion had exactly the same graphics (some looked better, some even poorer), and the great music by Chris Hülsbeck on the C64 wasn't present in the Amiga version.
View all comments (48)
Spend a lot of my childhood time on this one. Caused a lot of frustration! When you first die, its twice as difficult to move on because you have lost all your powerups. I've never seen the real end of the game, cause when I finally get to the last level, the disk error causes the graphics to getting all messed up, (invisible or fake walls, floor enemies) ... Well. Time to emulate it and explore the final stage...
By the way, bad luck with the resolution on the title picture.
View all comments (17)
I prefere the C64 version then playing this game slowly in Amiga. However I give a 9 note cause of the cool graphics and music.
View all comments (166)
After have played the C64 version, I was really disappointed at the Amiga version, even the graphics seems better on the 8bit counterpart, for example the diamonds on the C64 are better animated and the music on the Amiga seems a digitalization of the C64 music (which is better).
The "feeling" of the C64 version (that I repute a masterpiece) seems also vanished in this 16bit version, so while I give it a 10/10 for the C64 version I give this just a 6/10 cause if you want to play it just switch on the 8bit and play the Real Giana Sister...
(C64 10/10) Amiga (6/10)
View all comments (192)
This game is really, really, fun. Although I've played the Super Mario Bros. Version of this on NES, but this game has female characters in it. The C64 version of the GGS is okay, but the Amiga graphics is a lot better. If you like Mario Bros., you'll problary would love this game. Too bad Nintendo sued Rainbow Arts for good.
View all comments (1)
I have completed this game many times but still I want to play this again and again...
View all comments (86)
It was stupid idea to make this look like a Mario rip-off. A fine game anyway. Perhaps playability is a bit better on C64 version.
View all comments (250)
C64 version is more fun
View all comments (48)
Now this is a real classic! If Mario rip-off or not, this game has to be played by everyone who has even just touched a Amiga! By the way: Get the Soundtrack of Giana Sisters by Machinae Supremacy. Addictive! 8/10
View all comments (23)
This is the BLAST!
View all comments (2)
The sexy girl in the title screen has nothing to do with the strange short fat main character in the game itself. Great Gianna Sisters on Amiga is nearly identical to a C64 original - which is good.
View all comments (800)
Cool platform! And yes it is a "mario" rip off and so what? Anyway has anyone ever played a freeware version of it called "gianna's return"? Its like playing the original only on a pc!
View all comments (162)
Just as great as the C64 version.
View all comments (43)
The really really big problem with this game though, and the thing that got it removed was that the first five levels had *exactly* the same layout as Mario Bros... Nothing could excuse that and if they hadn't just nicked the layout they might have gotten away with it...
View all comments (11)
The controversial Mario rip-off that was taken off shelves after a week as far as I remember. It was a cracking little game though, nice bright graphics and cute soundtrack. Above all it was extremely addictive and thats what mattered.
View all comments (524)
It's hard to pick which one is better, this game or Super Mario Bros. Well it doesn't matter to me, Super Mario Bros is good, so as this game the Great Giana Sisters. Difference is, is that this game when you touch one of the creatures, you die straight away, not to shrink yourself like in Mario game, and of course of collecting the diamonds like collecting coins, and getting a lightning rod like getting a flower and few others as well which don't have those particular items on Mario but on Giana. Still both of those games are good. I don't have the version on C64, but on the Amiga, but I'm guessing both of those versions are the same. Excellent Game!!! I'm giving a good rate of 10 for this game.
View all comments (116)
I loved Giana Sisters and played it loads, it had same appeal as early Mario games and was a challenge at times. I loved the re-make of the giana sisters main tune, anyone want it let me know
View all comments (522)
Great game, but I prefer C64 version.
View all comments (232)
Fantastic platformer, although obviously a Super-Mario-rip-off.
View all comments (810)
A really cool Mario game for the Amiga, giving platform fans what they wanted. If you like running, jumping, powerups, stomping on monsters, shooting monsters, and breaking bricks puzzles, this game is for you. The thing was, I was never attracted to Mario games on the NES or SNES, but for some reason I enjoyed Giana Sisters very much, even if I wasn't very good at the game.
View all comments (30)
One of the few really good Mario-style platform games for the Amiga (and C64)... Hmm, wonder why? Apart from the first levels, this is not a straight Mario clone, so if they had provoked Nintendo a little bit less (why put SISTERS in the title? Why copy the graphic style almost 1:1?) it might not have been such a huge deal (maybe it was a failed marketing move). Just as playable as the C64 version, and features a nice intro tune.
View all comments (201)
1 of the biggest cult games ever and far superior to mario a 10!
View all comments (94)
Classic game...! Played it as a kid on Commodore 64 and this is retro.. In this version a few people think that the Commodore 64/128 version is better, but I think they are just the same. I played Gianna sisters myself for a couple of weeks ago when my friend was testing his old Amiga 500 from the attic
View all comments (75)
Super Mario Bros for the Amiga, in a transsexual kind of way. I understand the C64 version is better but I don't care too much for C64. For me this game was OK.
Nintendo certainly took great offence, hence the reason that 99.99999% of all known versions of this game were manufactured using X-Copy!
View all comments (105)