Here is an beta version of Giana’s Return v0.998 for Windows: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0PLUGOEI – You will require the full v0.997 installation, the zip only contains an updated exe.

The main and only change is that we do use modplug for playback instead of mikmod. Please report any bugs, if we don’t hear from you guys out there… we will consider this beta a v0.998 final and go on with the next minor steps.

Other ports will be updated as soon as we know that our main version (read the Windows version) is fine.

Our organizer is very busy at the moment, therefore no news since 2 weeks. Now I am on keyboard to discover some secrets on Giana’s Return. You know the ARMIN cheat? Here we have one, too

See comments…

…following us on Twitter might provide you with secrets about Giana’s Return you always wanted to know?

We got mail from “anotherguest” who is famous for several ports to the Symbian OS platform. He is very interested in porting our little game, so should we go for it?

The “Bad Monkee” guys behind the iPhone version/port of the OFFICIAL Giana Sisters sequel, announced the release of “Giana Sisters APP” for 9th February 2010.

Here is a review of the Giana iPhone APP in German language: http://apfelbiss.net/exklusiv-review-giana-sisters/

We were quite amused when we have found out, that a webpage holds all level codes of the Giana’s Return Windows release. As you guys might find it sooner or later on your own anyway, here is the link.

PS: Don’t try those on any other release, because each system release is having own passwords (Nasty, eh?)

PSS: There are also a bunch of other “cheats” not listed on that page linked above

Slaanesh ( http://www.slaanesh.net/ ) has released the initial port of Giana’s Return GP32. It runs pretty well and most of you might be astonished about the result. You can get the download from the dowload section.

Gianas.fxe is for NLU/FLU and BLU GP32’s
Gianas+.fxe is for the BLU+

All the data files must go into /gpmm/gianas on the GP32’s SMC.

Please give us feedback on this release and thanks to Slaanesh for his effort to port this to the GP32, it wasn’t an easy task!

Let’s write about the future of “Giana’s Return”.

The next step will be v0.998 – For now we use different playback methods for different system releases. Goal is to use just one good working (hence the “good working”) engine which plays our .XM files in a proper way. Extended Modules are a lot smaller and allow us to drop the streamed music part. Some releases which are over 20 MB in size, will reduce easily by 50%.

Also in theory streamed music, depending on the quality, takes more CPU power than playing tracked formats. At least this is the result of an interesting experiment, which allowed us to run “Giana’s Return” on a 133 MHZ ARM CPU handheld without any major problems. This means that if the new playback library is integrated, the additional CPU power will be used for the game itself, people who loved to overclock their handheld to get a better result will not need overclocking anymore.

So far there were no major bugs reported for v0.997, so the next release will be probably just having the internal change discribed above.

ZodTT has sent us an interesting video link showing off the OFFICIAL “Giana Sisters iPhone” game application.

Our unofficial “Giana’s Return iPhone” version, ported by ZodTTD, is on ice for now. Maybe a few weeks or months after the official release, there might be something possible from our side.