Genre: 2d platformer
Developer: Time Warp Productions
Publisher: GO! Media Holdings Ltd.

There is something about the early computer platforming games that captures the imagination, and The Great Giana Sisters, with its mostly solid-colored backgrounds and simple tile sprites, really hits the mark in that regard, despite not being very technically impressive. It's also a shame that the developer couldn't get scrolling working in this ST port, because the hitch-and-redraw background movement can happen at bad times, such as in mid-jump.

Chris Hülsbeck's "Giana" Commodore 64 soundtrack, with its jaunty main theme and intense castle tune, is one of the most iconic pieces of music from 1980s personal computing. Jochen Hippel does a great job of translating those melodies to the ST, with the songs taking on the typical chiming pleasantries that characterize PSG music. Sound effects are minimal but are stylistically faithful to the C64 originals.

Nominally a way to deliver a "Super Mario Bros." experience to home computer users, The Great Giana Sisters adds many of its own elements, such as the ability to fire projectiles, along with environmental hazards like falling bridges and bouncing balls, which must be leapt over. Unfortunately, and like other era platformers such as "Rick Dangerous", most of the challenge comes from memorizing enemy placements, versus dynamic precision platforming.

As is always the case with copyright Nazism, Nintendo's threatened legal action-- and the subsequent pulling of The Great Giana Sisters from store shelves-- completely backfired, with the game spreading like a wild fire via computer user groups, even prompting ports such as this ST version. In 1988 "Giana" must have been amazing, as it pre-dated similar MSDOS platform games, such as Commander Keen, by several years! In the end though, it's only a marginal representation of the genre, and this ST adaptation does suffer a bit through its lack of scrolling.