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The Great Giana Sisters - 2.5D PC remake


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One of the best (IMHO) games on the Atari ST, "The Great Giana Sisters", is about to come back on the PC. There is a KickStarter project by former members of the now defunct "Spellbound Entertainment" (known for GianaSisters DS and founded by Armin Gessert, the creator of Giana Sisters on the C64) to make a remake. The game seems largely finished and they seek additional funding to polish it. The release date will be October/November 2012.

 

It is in a 2.5D style (3D viewed from the side like Trine for example) and it looks awesome.

For the music they brought back Chris Huelsbeck who is working together with Machinea Supremacy. So I believe that will result in a soundtrack that is worth the game price alone :P

 

Oh, and if you donate $10.000, you get the only original boxed Atari ST version of "The Great Giana Sisters" too. I knew the game was rare but this must be the most expensive game on the ST.

 

Robert

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWxvJoEIZwo

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The silky smooth scrolling of Steve Bak games are done using "data reduction". For example, "Return to Genesis" is ultra smooth but it uses scrolls only half of the screen. Then the ultra smooth GoldRunner has also a big status panel at the right reducing the scrolling area and the scrolling is also only 2 bitplanes (4 color background). Jupiter Probe and Leatherneck also have a massive status panel reducing the scrolling area to half of the screen. Only StarRay has a status panel that does not cover half of the screen (but it is still pretty big).

 

And his 4 way scrolling game (James Pond) does not scroll as smooth as his other games.

 

But Steve Bak is not the only one who used the "data reduction" trick for scrolling, there are many other examples. Also Wayne Smithson's Anarchy scrolls only 2 bitplanes to achieve smooth scrolling.

 

Robert

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The silky smooth scrolling of Steve Bak games are done using "data reduction". For example, "Return to Genesis" is ultra smooth but it uses scrolls only half of the screen. Then the ultra smooth GoldRunner has also a big status panel at the right reducing the scrolling area and the scrolling is also only 2 bitplanes (4 color background). Jupiter Probe and Leatherneck also have a massive status panel reducing the scrolling area to half of the screen. Only StarRay has a status panel that does not cover half of the screen (but it is still pretty big).

 

And his 4 way scrolling game (James Pond) does not scroll as smooth as his other games.

 

But Steve Bak is not the only one who used the "data reduction" trick for scrolling, there are many other examples. Also Wayne Smithson's Anarchy scrolls only 2 bitplanes to achieve smooth scrolling.

 

Robert

 

 

 

 

 

 

I guess you could say that Mssrs Bak and Smithson 'cheated' then by using unchartered regions of the st hardware or failing that, software based hardware trickery...like the little tricks they presently do/use on the A8 and c64 as mentioned on a million and one atari/c64 sites, including this one

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I guess you could say that Mssrs Bak and Smithson 'cheated' then by using unchartered regions of the st hardware or failing that, software based hardware trickery...like the little tricks they presently do/use on the A8 and c64 as mentioned on a million and one atari/c64 sites, including this one

 

Mmmmm, you could indeed say they cheated by cleverly reducing the amount of data they have to scroll. But this has nothing to do with "using unchartered regions of the st hardware or failing that, software based hardware trickery" (I suppose you mean sync-scrolling with this).

 

I suppose if they had made Giana Sisters a scrolling game, they also would have resorted to reducing the scrolling area of the screen. Maybe similar to Turrican that also uses a smaller screen by cutting pixels from the left and right.

 

Robert

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I don't think that game using scrolling is better than game with static screen, just because of scrolling. If transition to next screen is done cleverly, static screen is OK.

 

And discussion above reminded me on Heartland 2000 - it scrolls very well practically full screen. I guess at price of using almost 100% CPU power, so not much left for other things in gameplay.

CPU at 8MHz can some 1.6 MB/sec. At 50 fps = about 32KB ~ screen size. With movem may little more - but likely not really usable for scrolling..

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