Diddy Kong Racing DS Review
Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo 64 came out during the glory days of Rare, at a time when they could do little wrong. And while in some respects Diddy Kong Racing was superior than Mario Kart 64, some aspects prevented it from being better overall. Fast forward 10 years and the situation is much the same; Diddy Kong Racing hits the DS after Mario Kart DS and again while it has its good aspects, it failed where Mario Kart succeeded.
Diddy Kong Racing DS can be thought of as a remix of the original game. While most, if not all of the N64 features remain intact to make it more handheld friendly and to utilize the Nintendo DS, Rare have mixed it up a bit, which has not been as successful as it should be.
The best thing DKR brings over from N64 version is the story mode. With an over world to explore, you can drive, fly or hover your character to each different world. Each world has 5 levels which can then be completed once with a race, then again with a new Touch Challenge mode. This mode replaces the silver coin challenge as the second event on the tracks within the worlds. This mode has you flying on Tajs magical carpet around the track popping balloons. Its not competitive, but it is a pain to control, with the player needing to slide the stylus to move the camera and then tap. This challenges need to be done on all the levels but thankfully you dont need to tap all 50 balloons.
Boss levels remain the same except for the third time you go up against them which utilises the touch screen, but more on that later.
The racing component MOSTLY remains the same with zippers along the floor, in the sky and in the water for whatever you are driving. Picking up balloons allows for power-ups, if you collect two of the same power-up in a row it goes to a upgraded one such as a even more powerful boost or rockets spinning around your vehicle. This upgrading is also made easier because if you run into another balloon of a different type your item will not change.
However, the part that has changed in the game is the touch screen elements at the start of the races and during the third challenge of the bosses. At the start of races you are required, depending on what you are driving, to use some sort of touch gesture to get a boost. Gone are the days of just hitting at a appropriate time. Now, if you’re driving the car you have to spin the on screen wheel, which is pretty much broken with a full red boost nearly impossible to achieve. Next up is the plane which you must rotate the propeller to get a boost, again it suffers the same problem in that a sufficient boost is hard to get. Not only that, both of these mean that youll loose a little ground by having to re-adjust your hands back on to the DS properly. For the hovercraft, you get a boost by blowing into the microphone. Of course you can go without the boost, but blowing into the microphone like this is something out of Feel the Magic. It just seems out of place and to get a sufficient boost means you have to put the DS right near you mouth, meaning again youll be off put for the first few seconds while you pull it away from your face. There is also a mini game challenge from Taj that requires you to use the microphone which again feels broken and is more frustrating than fun.
However, thats not the most dissapointing part of the touch screen implementation. The third encounter with the bosses are worse, they require you to draw a path for your car to drive along, ala Kirby Canvas Curse style, and if you dont steer it right or run out of ink like in Kirby, lines are only a certain length) youll need to spin the wheel on the screen which is placed in the bottom left hand of the screen, so its hard to do proper strokes to get it going. Thankfully you dont need this mode to unlock anything or complete the adventure. You might give it a go once or twice, but I found myself incredibly frustrated to the point where I turned off the game.
The single player game is great even with its touch based flaws. There are a good amount of things to unlock, most of which pertain to multiplayer or extras, and thats where we are heading now…
The Unlock system in the game has a few problems. Basically everything costs too much. If youre an avid single player and dont want to play online or with mates youll have no worries, however if you like to dabble in a bit of both or even local multiplayer youll be redoing races over and over again to get the coin count up. Every track has coins littered on it no matter the mode. These coins are for use in Tajs wish menu, in there you can update your car, unlock maps and characters. You can play through the game once and then have enough money for all the single player upgrades, then youll want to go back through the Adventure 2 mode so you can get all the battle and multiplayer tracks which you can’t play until you have purchased them. Rare are reknown for making gamers collect items, and DKR is no different.
Online and Local Multiplayer though is a blast, however its not without faults. While the net code is stable and finding a game is easy, if you have an upgraded car it will carry through onto the online making the game unbalanced between the people who have the upgrades and not. There is no snaking though, which is an improvement over the unfairness that was Mario Kart multiplayer. DKR however is not without his game breaking online vice too. T.T is just to fast against anyone with a normal character. If someone chooses T.T, they are certain to win, unless they severaly lack any talent playing games. At least T.T offers those who struggle with the game a better chance at success. While playing online, even though the racing is of a slower pace the Mario Kart 64, weapon strategy plays a greater part. Online mode supports up to six players and perhaps the best friend codes system. When you check your friend list you can see what your friends are doing, what they are racing, and theres a lobby which you can join without having to sit and see if youre going to connect or not.
Local Multiplayer supports up to 8 players and also the Wish Race mode and although you cant make anything expansive, a simple track in any direction with variable height is about how far it goes, but you can do anything from a rollercoaster to a complicated series of twist and turns. You can share these tracks with your mates as well.
I mentioned that it was a slower game, while Mario Kart DS runs at 60fps, DKR runs at a stable 30FPS, so a frame rate isnt that much to worry about unless you have the upgraded car, in which it casuse the game to run really slow. That being said, the game does look very good with improved textures but featuring a lower resolution. The game however, has lost a bit of its sparkle. While the menu and intro are nicely presented, the character select screen for example is now just the characters lined up on the page, no dancing any more and no Banjo or Conker either.
The characters omitted due to the Rare fiasco are now replaced with Tiny and Dixie Kong. Tajs voice however has lost Indian accent and instead sounds like a kid with a mouth full of chocolate. Sure it may be politically incorrect but come on, all Genies have Indian accents! (Dont they?) The games music travels to the DS well, while most of the music is exactly the same some of it has been remixed, however like Taj, most of the characters voices have been changed for the worse.
Yes the game isnt perfect but the additions made the DKR core such as online and the extensive amount of things to unlock and do give this game awesome value, not many developers have done good on the DS on their first go and you gotta give Kudos to them for that. The game is not as good as Mario Kart DS but its not trying to be the same thing, there is plenty to see and do here, if you picked it up on the N64 you should be impressed with how it plays on the DS.
In the end, this is game is a lot of fun and that’s what counts doesn’t it?
