25. The Great Giana Sisters
Alright, let's get back to reviewing non-holiday-based games for the next 10-11 months, at the very least. This time around, I've decided to take a look at one of the most technically successful, highly-touted, not to mention downright-infamous releases in the entire Commodore 64 catalog - 1987 side-scrolling platformer The Great Giana Sisters.
History has shown us that if a game inspires a threat of litigation, it's generally notable in some form: be it obvious commercial potential (bootleg mid-80s Tetris ports), edgelord art-object status (Custer's Revenge), or actual honest-to-goodness quality (take a guess). While The Great Giana Sisters can't replicate all the subtleties of it's glaringly-obvious inspiration of Super Mario Bros. and the specialized NES hardware on which it runs, developer Time Warp Productions made a splash by creating a game that generated its own buzz merely by nature of being a particularly great platformer on a computer where such heroics were in demand.
It's impossible to review this game without comparing the parallels and differences with SMB, so let's get all of that work out of the way before we proceed. Make no mistake - The Great Giana Sisters is graphically inferior, audibly inferior, and is "only" one of the better computer games of the 1980s instead of being straight-up one of the best games of the 1980s. Happy now, Nintendo fans? Now we can spend the rest of the review talking about all the high points.
I'd be remiss not to mention the game's title screen, which looks absolutely remarkable, along with the inclusion of music among some of the best-sounding that I've heard out of the SID chip. This opener screams quality from the get-go, highlighting the range of sounds that can be conjured through the C64's hardware and practically jumping through the speakers with its energy.
The story.. is mostly there. There are these two sisters: Giana and Maria (yes, this does mean 2-player turn-based gameplay), and they're dreaming all of this different wacky stuff (33 levels worth of it, specifically), and I think they're searching for a jewel. There are some instructions, only some of them really matter ("Have you ever jumped on a neurotic eye?", the game helpfully inquires), there's some nice parallax scrolling, let's get on with our day.
Ever played Mario? Know how Mario works, at least? You should be OK here, then. The influence in apparent in the character design, level design, and power-ups like fire, beach-balls (see: mushrooms), lightning (see: fire flower), double-lightning (fire flower but the fireballs bounce all over the place), and strawberries. Coins? Oh, they're diamonds now. It's easy enough to pick up. I'm sure if this were 1987 and you hadn't yet played SMB by some fluke of the universe, you'd still figure it out fairly easily.
6502 hardware brethren aside, a few prominent mechanical bits are unfortunately missing in Time Warp's effort to stand on the shoulders of mustachioed Italians. With the limitations of the C64's joystick, there's no run button, which would certainly have proven helpful in both negotiating some longer platform jumps as well as setting speed-running world-records in more recent times. This also means that jumping is mapped to the "up" direction on the joystick, in a stiff bag-flick to gamers who would like to have some semblance of accuracy in controls on their side. In what has become a recurring theme for these articles, this blow is softened through the use of a Sega Genesis controller via the Retro Rewind C64/Amiga Genesis Joypad Adapter. This adapter also includes a DIP header allowing the player to map the up switch to a spare button on the Genesis controller, bringing our control scheme into relative modernity.
The game's quirks and limitations aren't all in hardware, to be fair. Despite Giana's public perception as an unrepentant SMB clone, the game's doesn't quite land 100% true-to-plumber in its overall presentation, and both the excessively-floaty physics and the creative selection of esoteric flora and fauna land about halfway between Super Mario Bros. and Hudson's Adventure Island series. Everything just feels a hair jankier - the little bit of flickering on some of the sprites, the inconsistent manner in which you either squash an enemy or immediately lose a life on what feels like the exact same jump-on-head action.. it's great, but it's not perfect.
Giana is also a constant "one-touch-and-you're-dead" affair. Being used to the extra hit (and opportunity for reckless damage-boosting) that a mushroom allows, I did find it kind of strange to be one-shotted by random enemies after picking up a beach ball. This gameplay element does cause you to be a little more cautious in how you progress, which creates a bit of extra stress when combined with the relatively short timer accompanying each level.
But, you know, I feel like I bickered a little bit too much about Giana's flaws and inconsistencies for how much I enjoyed this game overall. Maybe fun's tougher to articulate in critical form than disappointment? Either way, don't take my whining to heart, go play a few rounds, it's great. For all its faults, The Great Giana Sisters is simple, attractive, fun, and addictive in all it's copycat glory, standing as one of the best Commodore games of its era and demonstrating that the C64 could hang with the consoles in offering solid 8-bit side-scrolling experiences.
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