We are currently trying to pack up whatever we added and fixed so far to push out a new version soon.

Our beta-tester Mulle is free towards end of the week so if everything goes straight there should be new versions for GP2x, Wiz and Windows. Count with x to 14 days :)

Slaanesh and Thor tried to hunt down the “segment fault” on Dingux. Unfortunatly it seems to be a SDL only problem and not a problem of the Giana’s Return source code. Our hands are tied for now :(

Mulle got a hint from a user named tilliamable. The hint contained a link to a YouTube video where Chris Hülsbeck, sound king of “The Great Giana Sisters”, has been interviewed. The interview is fully in German and he mainly answers the questions about why a female hero and where the idea for the soundtrack came from. He also mentions that there will be an official iPhone version. With official it means that you will have to pay money for it.

As the official developers need to re-earn their investment, our unofficial version can not be released (at this time) due to respect. A commercial success of the title might lead into more games and another official part could not hurt :)

YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veya7Bw1c04

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.