There were a lot of platformers on the Super Nintendo, but none gave players as much motion sickness as Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D. Now, that’s maybe not the best way to introduce the re-release of this 1993 French title, but it has to be said — the parallax scrolling in Jim Power simply made a lot of kids nauseous back in the day. The idea behind the game’s bizarre visuals was that the player would be wearing a pair of 3-D glasses (as the title implies), which makes the various background layers pop to different degrees. But in order to make the graphics look relatively normal without the glasses, the game employs the Pulfrich effect, which depends on motion to activate. That means that even with the glasses, Jim Power is a little awkward to look at, because the 3-D effect dissipates when you stop to fire at enemies.
Anyway, following up on the Steam release of the game a few years back, PIKO and QUByte Interactive are now re-releasing Jim Power for the Switch and PS4, with physical editions by Strictly Limited. As a fancy limited physical release, there are all kinds of various editions available, even cartridges for retro consoles. But even putting aside all that stuff, this is a pretty cool archival release — it includes not just the original SNES game, but a remade NES version and the previously-unreleased Sega Genesis version of the game (until February of this year, when it and the NES version were added to the Steam listing). There are also the typical visual filters to make you feel like you’re playing on a CRT television.
What’s uncertain, though, is whether or not there will be any option to disable or at least tone down the vomit-inducing scrolling effects. The version on Steam says that the effect has been disabled, but I can’t find any mention of this for the Switch and PS4 versions. Only the Special Edition comes with 3-D glasses, but they’re oddly the blue-red anaglyphic variety rather than the single darkened lens that the game originally came with. In any case, there’s a simple solution here for anyone ordering the standard edition or buying the game digitally — just get a cheap pair of sunglasses and pop one of the lenses out.
So with all of that said, why would you want to play Jim Power? Well, it’s a pretty neat little project, one that bears little resemblance to the American and Japanese-made platformers of the 90s. There’s a mix of gameplay, from side-scrolling run-and-gun levels to top-down stages like the ones in Contra 3, and even space shooter sections. Plus, there’s an incredible soundtrack by Chris Huelsbeck, the composer for the Turrican games. Jim Power is an odd bird, for sure, and definitely not one of the all-time SNES great action titles, but it’s something different, and the inclusion of the unreleased Genesis version and a specially-recreated 8-bit NES version is a nice touch.
Preorders for Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D start Sunday, May 29 at Strictly Limited. The game will be available on digital storefronts on June 2 for $9.99, which is to my mind a pretty good price point for three different versions of the title. And hey, the standard version of the physical release has a manual, so I might have to pick that up.
