Jumping Flash!

On a platform in the sky there lived a robbit

Nick ignores his motion sickness and delves into this first-person platformer… hurk!

» Playstation » 1995 » Exact/ultra of all the games on the original version of

Demo 1, Jumping Flash! was the one i found most fascinating. the music was jaunty, there was a frog in a top hat, and i’d never seen a platform game like it. A little while later I got to try the game when I was given a bunch of old Official Playstation Magazine demos, and I decided that I had to have it. However, I struggled to track it down – I got the Playstation a few years into the machine’s life, and used copies weren’t easy to find by that point.

Thankfully, when I did get it I wasn’t disappointed. It sounds like it shouldn’t work – platforming sections are often notoriously poorly implemented in first-person games. However, the way the view automatically shifted to show you what was under Robbit’s feet during high jumps was excellent. Jumping Flash! isn’t a hard game and Playstation graphics had already moved on considerably, but the music is excellent and the levels are fun to explore – I particularly loved the fact that you could reach dizzying heights with the triple jump. Plus, it’s just nice to play a game from a time when designers were still trying to crack 3D platform games, before Super Mario 64 set the genre’s conventions.

So as you can imagine, I’m really pleased to see that Jumping Flash! has been announced for the Playstation Classic. Hopefully, some of you will play it for the first time and come to love it like I do.