Geograph Seal
In 1995, Exact released Jumping Flash on the PS1, a game that blends first-person shooting and 3D platforming. While Jumping Flash has become a cult classic for its unique gameplay, less people know about Exact’s previous game that predates Jumping Flash by just a year. Most people who do know about it almost certainly haven’t played it.
Released in 1994, Geograph Seal comes right off the tail end of the Sharp X68000’s life. The once arcade-level home computer had stopped receiving new hardware upgrades the previous year, and new, 32-bit and 64-bit gaming consoles were coming along with flashier, more impressive and smooth 3D graphical capabilities than what the mighty Sharp computer could muster. After seven years as one of the more powerful systems on the market, the X68000 was finally due to quietly fade away as computers lost whatever grasp on the Japanese games market they once held, and consoles came into increasing popularity.
At the tail end of all of this, with seven years’ worth of knowledge of the X68k’s capabilities and inner workings, is when Exact released Geograph Seal, an odd futuristic first-person arcade shooter where the player has the ability to hop on enemies’ heads to deal damage.
If any of this sounds similar to Jumping Flash… that’s because it is. In fact, the most surprising thing about Geograph Seal is how most of Jumping Flash is directly taken from it, mechanically. The starkest differences are in objectives, weapons and level structure. In Geograph Seal, you have four weapons: Vulcan, Laser, Riat(?) Missiles, and Homing Shots.
All four can be upgraded with pick-ups obtained from destroying objectives. As opposed to Jumping Flash’s launch modules, the objectives in Geograph Seal are enemies that have to be blown up, and each one drops either a weapon upgrade or a health boost. The game describes what objectives you’re looking for at the beginning of every mission with a flashy mission briefing.
While its more polished, slightly more popular successor goes by the structure of six worlds with two stages and a boss fight each, Geograph Seal has six levels with a boss fight at the end of each one.
With so many similarities, you might get the idea that Geograph Seal is just a rougher draft for Jumping Flash, and you’d be right, to an extent. But the aesthetic and structural differences in Geograph Seal do make it unique enough to be an interesting game, and if anything the similarities simply show how well they nailed it on their very first attempt. It’s admirable, considering full 3D gaming was yet to be polished to a more approachable state for a couple more years.
X68k 3D is… a bit rough to look at. But while it looks crude and dithered, Geograph Seal actually runs exceptionally well for such an old 3D game. On the strongest hardware, the game doesn’t ever actually dip below its max framerate. Its max is lower than the 60 frames per second that Jumping Flash can reach, but the fact that it can maintain it consistently is pretty admirable regardless.
The low-res 3D itself also has a bit of an odd appeal to it. It’s not very clean or easily readable, but the game is easy enough that it doesn’t really get in the way too much… if you can stomach it, at least. It’s very similar to Star Fox: flat and untextured and plainly just crude and dated, but at the same time that gives it a pretty unique quality that’s almost sort of hypnotic to see in motion.
The flying level and the tunnels are the exception though. Those levels hurt. They are painful to play, but even more to look at. Pray that you don’t die on the boss fights and have to replay them. I will pray with you.
The coolest moment in Geograph Seal by far though, is the ending.
After a fairly lackluster final boss, you launch yourself up into space to get transported back to base… only to have your transport destroyed, attacked by a flying enemy machine with rockets and long extending green laser whips! Without any means of movement, you have to shoot down this enemy alone in the vacuum of space, praying that you can avoid its attacks long enough to destroy it.
Like every boss in Geograph Seal, which mainly consist of floating green orbs or walkers that shoot out bundles of rockets and energy blasts, it’s not exactly a deep challenge, but it’s a fun little setpiece to end the game on. Geograph Seal isn’t a timeless classic, but its quality is still impressive for the kind of game that it is, and it’s worth taking a look at if you have any sort of love for the Jumping Flash games. It’s a pleasant surprise for the X68000’s library, and a pretty decent way to cap off the life of a computer that was, for some years, the strongest system on the market. Alas, by 1995, it was finally time for console hardware to transcend it.
And with newer hardware comes along newer games from Exact, not only in Jumping Flash, but very arguably in their licensed Ghost In The Shell game for the PS1 as well. Geograph Seal was never bound for massive popularity, and neither were its spiritual sequels, but it lives on both as its own genuinely impressive piece of early 3D gaming, and in the handful of beloved PlayStation games that spawned from it.
