Not to sound like a parrot - or worse: a comparative bore - but Jumping Flash! really does promote a singular devotion to an alternate future which, unlike speculative fictions or realities magic, is exciting without valuating the differences between what we see in it vs. what we see in the later art that took none of its influence. It’s difficult to totally comprehend how different 3D platformers would be (or if that would even be the genre’s name had this game been the tree of fruit and mana at the centre of first gen polygon rendering’s garden) if Jumping Flash! were as culturally revered as Mario 64, but it’s fun to tread in buildings evincing how little of a blueprint was drawn up at the time of M64 and JF being new colleagues. Although the priorities differentiating the two on a second by second play analysis reveal hugely different design aspirations, what grabbed me most by my collars and frills was less what the differentiated attempts at features show and more what the acceptable losses in their respective plough plots bely. The two are not so different as to be any more the other’s opposite as one side of a coin is to its reverse but nonetheless, it’s exciting to think about. JF’s precision sacrifices expression, and M64 chose to go directly opposite, reinforcing the playground feel of childhood with the associated energised clumsiness of newly grown muscles. While they both abstracted level design, JF went for an extension of 2D platformer design - funnelling play through a series of challenges meted out to incur play stories as opposed to the verisimilitude of a travelled world; M64’s abstractions are indicative of an attempt to round out the character of the various kingdoms, the space’s differences of imposing challenge, and the abstractions imbed flavour to the wireframe of mechanics instead of honing that wireframe to its purpose. Of course the first person v third person perspective is the most significant difference: if first person had prevailed in being top seller, we might be calling the genre DoomJumpers or something akin. It’s not easy to totally quantify how this changes game feel from JF M64, as the idea of control, while comparable in object, is taken for different granted positions. If anything, I think JF probably can only be lumped into the genre post-hoc. If the designers believed they were making a statement for future game design, I think they would have attempted something more cohesively representative of what the strengths of their ideals forcefully communicated, and in that manifesting, they would have made a less fun game. So idk, Jumping Flash! is the bomb and also very weirdly out of time.