We just got hot and fresh information from our all beloved porting machine Pickle, who is responsibel for a bunch of GP2x, Wiz and Pandora ports in the homebrew scene.

Right now MUSIC does not play on GP2x for whatever reason, this seems to be the last issue keeping us away from a public GP2x release.

We will keep you updated!

We had to fight with GP2x speed issues, this is why the initial planed GP2x release turned into a GP2x WIZ release.

Thor, Pickle and Flavor investigated time to get things running smooth on a GP2x too. A playable GP2x release should occour the next few days.

We have released the second public beta, you can get it here: http://pdroms.de/files/2207/

It’s untested, so let us know if you find any problems ;) Somehow we were not able to catch any WIZ owner for testing in advance…

Changes:
* No overclocking required anymore
* Replaced the spikey treecactus with another object, due to severall requests.

Please delete any old installation before you use this one!

We currently still look for people who could work on the following versions:

* GP2x
* Dingoo A320
* Dreamcast
* Pandora
* …?

Ports done and no help required:
* Win32 (unreleased)
* Ubuntu (unreleased)
* Debian (unreleased)
* Suse (unreleased)
* Wiz (public beta, released)
* PSP (unreleased)

Giana’s Return aims to be a worthy inofficial sequel of “The Great Giana Sisters”. “The Great Giana Sisters” is an alltime classic Jump’N’Run game made in the late eighties mainly by Armin Gessert, Manfred Trenz and Chris Hülsbeck and gained massive attention as “Super Mario” copy, but still had it’s very own charme and fanbase.

Giana’s Return – Features:
* 7 Worlds, with each 8 Levels – followed by a “big boss”
* Power Ups and Extras
* Oldschool style pixeled sprites and tiles
* Wonderful hand drawn backgrounds
* Illustrated hand drawn storyline
* Over 18 Tracks of finest chip music!
* Multi-Language: German, English, French, Spanish
* Password and/or save game (depending on release platform)
* Hidden Warp Zones and Bonus Caves
* Hidden Trainer
* TOP 10 Highscore

Giana’s Return – Team:
Rudolphe Boixel (Thor) – Main Coder
Shahzad Sahaib (Kojote) – Project Organizer & Level Design
Jane S. Mumford (Jayne) – Graphics Artwork
Alexander Oldemeier (Operator) – Music
David Wuttke (AM-FM) – Music
Adam Karol (Wizzard) – Graphics Artwork
Simon Butler – Graphics Artwork
Virgil Metier (tHUG) – Graphics Artwork
Christian Hildenbrand (DayDream) – Graphics Artwork
Denny Müller (Mulle) – Main Beta Testing
Ed Mandy (Flavor) – WIZ Port

This release is a PUBLIC BETA to gain feedback and take suggestions for the final version. You are more than welcome to let the authors know your two or three cents.

Please do not MIRROR the release file, the beta’s official download is here: http://www.pdroms.de/files/2207/

While you are all waiting for “Giana’s Return” another Giana has returned faster than ours :)

Roman Hoegg is working on an open source Giana Sisters game named OpenGGS. You can find it here: http://openggs.romanhoegg.ch/

We hope to be ready for the Wiz release by end of next week. We’ve spotted a small bug, which needs further investigation, so this drops back a bit.

A Win32 release is planed for mid/end of August.

Long time supporter Joachim Hesse ( http://www.diewichtigstezutat.de/ ) wrote an article for the guys at eurogamer.de about the upcomming Giana’s Return release. The article can be found here: http://www.eurogamer.de/articles/blog-portion-schwestern-fur-lau-blog-eintrag

Our GFX Artist Jayne made up her mind once again and provided us with custom backgrounds for the bosses! This leaves just one part left… the last music track!

Our coder got Giana’s Return working on Debian Lenny!