Out of all of the PSX's first party classics, Jumping Flash! is one of the most undersung, despite being the definition of a trailblazer. Released a year before Super Mario 64 would revolutionize 3D cameras in games and help solidify the 3D platforming subgenre, Jumping Flash! is a 3D platformer/shooter played from a first person perspective. Many developers have tried over the years to integrate platforming into the FPS genre and nearly as many have failed to really make it work. This makes it all the more impressive that a game from 1995 not only managed to make first person platforming fun, but even incorporates the act of hopping into its combat in a fairly novel way.
Robbit, your mecha rabbit player character, can jump up to three times in the air. Whenever you perform a double or triple jump, the camera aims downward to let you see where you'll be landing. This has the double use of letting you fire you blasters down at anything below you. Because jumping on enemies does even more damage than simply firing at them with your default guns, you're encouraged to leap high into the sky and rain lasers onto your foes from above as you come crashing down on top of them. After making contact with the enemy, you'll bounce right back up into the air, letting you repeat the process. This all leads to the combat having a very tactile feel and keeps you moving. You'll start to treat the floor like lava as you bounce from one enemy to the next in succession. It's a very unique kind of shooting/platforming experience even to this day.
Sadly, the game's origins as an early PSX game do limit how fully realized this gameplay loop can be. You can only strafe in the air, and even then the controls for it are unintuitive. Enemies also come in relatively small numbers and have very basic attack patterns so you won't always be able to find a baddie to land on, breaking the flow. Some levels also take place in cramped corridors that do the aerial combat any favors. It's nothing too dire but these shortcomings stop the game from reaching its full potential and keep the game fairly tame and hard to perceive as anything other than a short, fun distraction instead of the game changer it almost was.
Some indie games in the past few years have experimented more and more with first person platforming, so perhaps a game will finally come along and show us the endgame that Jumping Flash! could have offered us if it were given more than a couple sequels.
https://youtu.be/LOwMWfud04U
Robbit, your mecha rabbit player character, can jump up to three times in the air. Whenever you perform a double or triple jump, the camera aims downward to let you see where you'll be landing. This has the double use of letting you fire you blasters down at anything below you. Because jumping on enemies does even more damage than simply firing at them with your default guns, you're encouraged to leap high into the sky and rain lasers onto your foes from above as you come crashing down on top of them. After making contact with the enemy, you'll bounce right back up into the air, letting you repeat the process. This all leads to the combat having a very tactile feel and keeps you moving. You'll start to treat the floor like lava as you bounce from one enemy to the next in succession. It's a very unique kind of shooting/platforming experience even to this day.
Sadly, the game's origins as an early PSX game do limit how fully realized this gameplay loop can be. You can only strafe in the air, and even then the controls for it are unintuitive. Enemies also come in relatively small numbers and have very basic attack patterns so you won't always be able to find a baddie to land on, breaking the flow. Some levels also take place in cramped corridors that do the aerial combat any favors. It's nothing too dire but these shortcomings stop the game from reaching its full potential and keep the game fairly tame and hard to perceive as anything other than a short, fun distraction instead of the game changer it almost was.
Some indie games in the past few years have experimented more and more with first person platforming, so perhaps a game will finally come along and show us the endgame that Jumping Flash! could have offered us if it were given more than a couple sequels.
https://youtu.be/LOwMWfud04U