Day 76 - that's Great, Sister!

Right, then.  It's been a tough few days... I have a promotion opportunity at work and I've had to drop everything fun to concentrate on that.  It's meant writing and editing and proof-reading and re-writing, etc., etc...  But it's submitted now, and I've taken some online tests this evening that I also had to complete, so I can forget about that for a few weeks until I hear the outcome.

That means I can get back to writing and editing and proof-reading and re-writing, etc., etc... but for fun, this time!

If you've followed me for any length of time, either here, in my other blog A Gamer Forever Voyaging, or on various message boards, you might know I'm quite a big advocate of Kickstarter.  There have been some fantastic video games projects on there, and all the ones I've been interested in have obtained funding, so far.

There's another one up there now... it's called Project Giana.

Hey, you can run on top of those bricks above the level! What a great idea!

There are those amongst you for whom this will strike an immediate chord.  Yes, it's a new version of a game that only just managed to see the light of day... Great Giana Sisters.

If you haven't heard of it before, then you can probably guess from the name that it's based on Super Mario Bros.  So much so, in fact, that Nintendo's legal team had it yanked from the shelves after less than a week on sale, the swines!  I managed to get a copy, though, being at the computer shop the day it was released.  And I really enjoyed the game.

The differences between levels are like night and day.

It really is a lot like Super Mario Bros.  The level design, enemy design and game design are all pretty close to Nintendo's classic, even to the point of there being secret bonus rooms and warps.  For computer owners with no chance of an official port, it was a pretty damn good substitute... for those that managed to get hold of it.

Its undignified removal from the shops means that copies have always been hard to come by, making them pretty valuable.  Pity, then, that my parents chucked mine out, along with all my other Commodore stuff, when I moved out.  Gaaahhhhh!!!

Mmmm, hope that was done in butter.

That's not a problem in this day and age, where emulators are preserving the classics (and the not-so-classics) for posterity.  You can just load up your system of choice and be transported back in time in an instant.  Doesn't make up for the loss of a potentially valuable item, but at least the game itself is there.

I'm interested to see how this new version turns out (if it does, in fact, turn out).  It's being produced by people from the original team, with Chris Huelsbeck contributing on the music front. He's been busy lately, and still is, having just had a successful Kickstarter project of his own come to a conclusion.  He's working on an epic multi-disc box set of the Turrican soundtrack, which I'm happy to say I'll be getting when it's finished.  I'm hoping to talk to Chris a little for this book, if he has the time.  And although its creator, Armin Gessert, is sadly no longer with us, there will be a place for him in this book too.