That Rev Chap

There are now some classic Playstation games available to download from the Playstation Store. Three so far, in fact. WipEout, Crash Bandicoot and Jumping Flash. I’m tempted to give Crash a go, as I never did play more than the demo, back in the day. WipEout is quite tempting, too, but I fear it will have aged very, very badly.

Jumping Flash, though, I like. I grabbed a second hand copy a couple of years ago and enjoyed it, so I knew it still stood up today. Graphically, it’s really quite nasty technically, though there’s some charm to the design. The controls could do with some updating now we have two sticks. But the core jumping gameplay still stands up pretty well.

There aren’t many first-person platform games and jumping bits in first person shooters tend to be rubbish, so this still feels different, twelve years later.

I wish I’d known that to save my game I had to create a virtual memory card before playing, though. Didn’t take me very long to do World 1 a second time, though.

After playing it on the PS3, I decided to try it on the PSP. Took a while to get it copied across – you need to use a cable and I had to update my PSP’s firmware – but I got there in the end. Looks much nicer on the small PSP screen, but the d-pad isn’t quite as good, which meant I had to do some readjusting.

Also, there doesn’t seem to be any way to keep save files in sync between PS3 and PSP, which is odd. I thought the idea was that you could play the game on your PS3 and then take it with you when you’re gallivanting about town, so I might be missing something.

Anyway, hopefully more people will discover Jumping Flash now it’s on the Playstation Store. I’m not sure it quite deserves full “lost classic” status, but it is an interesting and entertaining trip down one of gaming’s evolutionary cul-de-sacs.