Armin Gessert, the coder of “The Great Giana Sisters” died of a heart attack last Sunday (8th November 2009). It’s a really sad day and many of us will miss his genius mind. People may say “The Great Giana Sisters” is a Mario rip-off, who cares – fact is this game brought many of us a great time!

Thank you Armin! Thank you forever! We will try to make Giana’s Return even better, to show our appreciation!

Here is the official German message from Andreas Speer, Studio Manager at Gessert’s company Spellbound:

Liebe Freunde und Kollegen,

leider habe ich eine sehr traurige Nachricht zu verkünden: Armin Gessert ist in der Nacht von Samstag auf Sonntag völlig unerwartet, auch für alle die ihm nahe standen, an einem Herzinfarkt gestorben.

Kondolenzbekundungen, die mir zugeschickt werden, werde ich an seine Familie weiterleiten.

Viele Grüße
Andreas Speer
Studio Manager

Here is a more detailed announcement, in German once again: http://www.spellbound.de/?idcat=10&idart=284

Slaanesh has been helping out porting Giana’s Return to Dingoo Linux (Dingux). The port is suffering from “segment faults” once you jump into a bonus cave. Today we probably have tracked down this bug, but we still need to fix and test things. If this was indeed the problem, a Dingux version could appear the next three weeks.

The original v0.99.6 release was not able to work on GP2x machines with NATIVE firmware, this is a hotfix release. Giana’s Return GP2x now works on NATIVE Firmware and Open2x Firmware. As usual, thanks to Pickle for the hard work and thanks to everyone who was hinting us!

Download: http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/gp2x.cgi?0,0,0,0,35,2811

We’ve been moving to a new server and everything should be working again! More news soon.

It came to our attention once again, that “The Great Giana Sisters” are having an official commercial Windows appearance.

The remake of the classic should feature all 32 original levels, a remixed soundtrack by Chris Hülsbeck himself and a level editor.

As the Giana’s Return Team has decided to NOT make the level editor public, this might be a good, but not free, way to go.

The release seemed to be scheduled for around December 2009, publisher is BHV Software.

Several online shops had the game listed or still list it.

We have Indiket and Slaanesh on board now, who both are professional programmers and in fact a great addition to the team.

Indiket maintains the Dreamcast port – a prototype is done and working, as already posted once.

Slaanesh will port Giana’s Return for all Dingoo Linux (Dingux) users and possibly tries a Zodiac and GP32 port too. Due to speed issues, its not sure yet, if the GP32 is powerful enough.

Pickle has compiled new GP2x binaries for native Firmware, but they still need testing. More news on this soon. Curiously the GP2x release only works on GP2x’s with Open2x FW but not native FW.

The project manager of Giana’s Return, who also updates this webpage most of the time, is on vacation in China.

Don’t expect any updates for the next 10 days, also don’t expect any answers, unless the rest of the team might raise a voice :)

Zài jiàn!

Some user expirience problems with the GP2x release.

Something like “Giana’s Return” does not work on my GP2x-F100 does not really help, please let us know your MODEL (F100 First Edition, F100 Regular Edition or F200) PLUS if you use native Firmware or Open2x along with it’s version number.

Only this information will allow us to track the problem down!

Thank you!

Some of you might be happy to read, that we have a first prototype running on Dreamcast. Thanks to Indiket for his marvellous work!

After the hotfix for Windows, here comes the hotfix release for GP2x and Wiz users. It’s highly recommended to use this latest version, as the game could not be completed in the previously released update (v0.99.5).

Changes so far:

* Fixed screen shakes at bosses (cosmetic fix)
* Getting a powerup at a dissolveable bridge should temporary stop the bridge from crumbling away
* Jumping behavior is back to “normal” again, this should solve several issues intruduced with v0.99.5.
* Fixed owl moving behaviour in Level 32
* Fixed positioning bug after bonus cave in Level 45
* WIZ / GP2x – Fixed scripting bug, which left things in the RAM instead of freeing it.
* WIZ / GP2x – Recompressed music files, hardly any quality difference BUT saves 7mb of space!

Thanks to Pickle for the hard porting work!