This was another game that I picked up in my recent N64 haul, and it’s also another white whale of a game from my childhood. Like the Pokemon Stadium games, this was a game I played a fair bit when I was younger, but it was just SO hard that I thought there was never any way I was ever going to beat it (as a kid or as an adult). Even picking this game up again now, I thought I’d still never be able to beat it. I wasn’t even going to pick this game up again (despite its 300 yen price tag) recently until my friend Psy convinced me to pick it up, as it’s one of his favorites. I was still in a bit of a slump for what I was going to play next, and after picking this up for a little, I decided to toy around with it and see just how far I could get, even though I was super ready to eventually hit a point where I’d just have to put it down and call it quits. After about 10 or so hours with the Japanese version on real hardware, I actually managed to do it! I beat Wizpig and saw the credits, and managed to get 43 balloons (dipping into the post-game extra world to do the base races at least once) by the time I was done with it. Like with Pokemon Stadium I’m certainly not going to try to do the post-credits extra challenges all the way, but I’m incredibly proud of myself for sticking with this one long enough to actually complete it where my younger self never could~.

On Timber the Tiger’s island, the denizens run about, race vehicles, and play all day. That is until one day the big magical bully Wizpig comes along and starts ruining things for everyone. Until someone can beat him in a race, he won’t leave either! That’s where you come in! Picking one of the eight possible racers (whom you can swap between whenever you want on the title screen), you’ve gotta complete all the challenges around the island and kick that big awful Wizpig’s butt! It’s a quite complicated setup for a racing game of this era, admittedly, but that’s because this isn’t just a racing game. It’s an adventure racing game. What exactly that entails is a lot of what makes DKR such an odd and novel experience.

For the racing parts, it’s a quite solid cart racer with really polished tracks. While it does have items, it’s not like how something like Mario Kart 64 does. Instead of random item boxes, there are differently colored balloons you can pick up while you’re racing, and each one gives a different respective type of power up (reds give missiles, blues give boosts, etc.). While it’s a bit of a bummer that they’re quite so specialized compared to Mario Kart powerups (none of them have different directional capabilities the way you can fire a green shell forward or backwards, for example), they make up for that with a risk reward system of upgrades. Keep collecting the same kind of balloon, and your item will increase in strength. It’s a very neat system and allows for tracks to be much more heavily curated as to when players can have things like missiles, boosts, or traps, and give the game a very different kind of feel than something like Mario Kart 64.

One neat thing that it borrows from Super Mario Kart (but actual Mario Kart games actually use very infrequently) is the banana system. In Super Mario Kart, if you collect coins around the track, it’ll slightly increase your speed. Bananas do the same thing here, and the more you have, the faster you’ll go, adding another bit of strategy to each map. Do you go for bananas for extra speed, or race more efficiently to just get ahead in the first place? Or do you just go for powerups and try to win that way? This is made even more interesting when combined with aspects of DKR that it lacks compared to Mario Kart 64, such as drift boosting. Even though it came out barely a year later, the thought and ideas presented here make it a really different feeling kart racer than Mario Kart 64, and it does a great job giving a new and fun spin on this formula that I honestly think I overall prefer, at least in the broad strokes of things (especially as someone terrible at drift boosting XD).

The last really cool aspect that it has as a racing game is that it’s not just a cart racer, at least not in a literal sense. In addition to races that use your little carts, you also have races in airplanes as well as races in hovercraft, and the three vehicles handle very differently and make for some really cool variety in the types of races present. Sure, you’re probably familiar with how to drive a kart racing car, but can you translate that into the far more momentum-based driving of the hovercraft? Can you translate it to the twists and turns (and near lack of breaking) that you have in an airplane? DKR ends up having a ton of actually great variety in its tracks because of this, and it’s one more thing that makes the whole thing feel like such a special little racing game for the time.

As for the adventure aspects, there’s a lot to describe here. Rather than just a menu to scroll around to pick your races and what not, DKR has a hub area just like a game like Mario 64 does. Your goal here is to collect golden balloons, and you get those sometimes by special races in the hub world or just finding them hidden in the hub, but most of them are from winning races and challenges. There are four worlds (with one extra one unlockable after you beat the credits), and each one has four races each (with each world and each race having a required number of balloons you need to have to access it in the first place). Beat each one once, and you’ll get a balloon each time. After that, you’ll need to race the animal boss of that world, who is a special race with special mechanics, and they’re generally quite tough.

After that, you need to go and do all four races again, but this time with a special rule: There are 8 N64 coins hidden in the race, and you need to collect them all AND win against harder-than-last-time AI in order to get your balloon. Only after THAT can you go race the animal boss again (where they’re usually WAY harder) and then you win one of the four tokens that you’ll need to race Wizpig at the end. To top it all off, beating the animal boss that second time unlocks a Trophy Challenge, which is basically a grand prix of all that world’s races for one last big trophy (not a balloon), and you’ll want those trophies if you want to get to the last post-credits extra space world. Those trophy races, despite being against the hardest type of AI racers the game has, are ironically not very hard at all, as the CPUs are actually still just as vicious in regards to one another as they usually are. As a result, the same guy isn’t always getting the same places, so you don’t actually need to place first or second that many times to win even the hardest of them. Not really a complaint, but something that’s odd all the same.

If my exasperation didn’t quite come through in the last two paragraphs, the only thing that really needs explanation here is that a lot of the “neat” and “unique” ideas that make up DKR are often what make it such a difficult game to recommend. Most of these ideas of adventure game and racing game melding are certainly “neat”, but it’s a lot harder to argue that they’re particularly “good” ^^;. The N64 coin collecting challenges are a neat idea, but the also just take so much of the fun out of kart racing. Especially in certain stages where you can really tell that these stages were specifically designed to make the coin challenges a nightmare, it can really start to grate on the fun aspects of an otherwise really solid racing game. Same thing goes for the animal boss races, including ol’ Wizpig himself, who are dastardly difficult and 100% deserve the infamous reputation they’ve caused this game to have. Heck, even just finding your way around the island to the different worlds can be confusing at times.

On top of that, you have the actual way the game works under the hood which makes all of that that much more frustrating. The AI cheats, sure. That’s likely no surprise at all, as that’s how basically every racing game works, especially on the N64. What’s a bit more annoying is how they cheat, especially when combined with the other mechanics at play. One thing that can feel like cheating is certain badly explained mechanics. Racers actually have different stats for max speed, acceleration, and handling, but they’re just hidden away in the manual, not the game. The correct way to boost, on the other hand (laying off the accelerator until the flame behind you goes away) is never explained anywhere though, so far as I can tell. That’s just bad communication of information, however, and it’s not what I’m talking about here when I say the AI cheats. Compared to something like Mario Kart’s item system, it’s very easy to observe when the AI is cheating itself items it shouldn’t have, such as when it gets automatic tier 2 or 3 trap items from green balloons despite only grabbing 1 of them (because it’s the first green balloon of the race). Similarly, sure, bananas can make you go faster, but I cannot count how many times the AI just inexplicably was FAR faster than me despite having no bananas while I had over 10 (a very high amount).

Even outside of just how frustrating the animal boss fights can be, at least they’re not other cart racers. There’s some expectation that they’re operating on unfair or different rules from the player. The actual racers, however, are both observably quite bad at actual racing (hence why the coin challenge AI feel so much harder than the actually-better-at-racing Trophy Challenge AI), and their cheating is so obvious that it makes it all the more annoying when you just can’t quite beat them at a particular challenge. The actual recycling of content is quite clever, especially when it comes to using new vehicles on different tracks, but the way it’s all executed ends up very consistently turning a fun time into a frustrating time.

The aesthetics are, very predictably for a game from Rareware, really excellent. The racers themselves are all 3D models, no 2D tricks here outside of how certain things like your wheels render, and the tracks are all distinct and fun and colorful. The music is also, of course, freakin’ fantastic. Even in the little breaks I took between the three play sessions I beat this in, I just couldn’t get the sound track out of my head, and even despite all my issues with the game and just how relieved I was to FINALLY beat Wizpig and see the credits, I nevertheless STILL went back to check out the last extra world at least in part to see what new music it had! While this is far from my favorite N64 game, this is easily one of my favorite sound tracks on the system, that’s for sure.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a weird thing where if you’re trying to play this game for multiplayer stuff, it’s an excellent game and very highly recommendable. It’s a very well put together kart racer with a ton of personality and a stellar presentation, albeit with battle maps that are a little wanting. On the other hand, if you’re trying to play the single-player content, you’re in for a VERY rough time with a LOT of caveats to your enjoyment. Rare was never great at balancing their games, and DKR is no exception to that. If you go in with your expectations tuned accordingly, I think you can still have a really fun time with this one (especially if you’re a racing game fan), but if you’re a more casual racing game fan and/or you MUST see the credits of any game you start, I think Diddy Kong Racing is probably a game you’re better off not playing, as it’s far more likely to bring frustration rather than fun.

Played this game for the first time recently and got 100% including beating all developer times. It's very impressive how well this game holds up. Rare's familiarity with making racing games definitely outshines Nintendo just barely getting used to the genre at the time.

There's some small quirks that once you understand, make the game very satisfying, and also not nearly as difficult as its reputation would have you believe. Specifically, holding B while drifting gives you a really sharp turn. Otherwise the drifting kind of has a bit of "Turn right to go left" energy. But the sharp turn button in addition to this lets you lean left or right just enough to reposition yourself to grab collectibles/hit speed boosts, while giving you the level of control needed to handle anything the tracks throw at you. You have such fine control here that going to more modern games like Mario Kart 8 feels stiff to me now despite getting into that game first. And even more importantly, if you let go of the gas while boosting, you keep the speed MUCH longer than you would if you just held onto it the whole time. The boosts feel so weak if you don't do this, and I imagine this mechanic being somewhat obscure is why the game is so infamous for being insanely challenging. Not to say mastering the game is a cakewalk but if you don't know this one weird trick Rareware doesn't want you to know, the final boss is near unbeatable.

But yeah very enjoyable game, the minor collectathon elements are very cool and appreciated. I kind of wish there was more to find in the hub world, but it just being there at all is very novel to this day. The boss races are a lot of fun. Just so much stuff that hasn't really been replicated in the genre very often, if at all. Makes this game a must play for all time. Great to hear more David Wyse music too. It being a racing game it allowed him to branch out a bit in style from what he normally does, and there's a lot of good stuff in the ost here. And it's really impressive that they made cars, boats, and planes all work so well so long ago. Wouldn't be until Sonic all stars transformed where we see something like it.

Only major complaint I could really have is that level theming leaves a bit to be desired. There's the generic grassy fields, desert levels, and ice caves. A vaguely horror themed one. And the space tracks are super cool. But generally speaking not a whole lot stands out as far as theming goes. Making a lot of the game not quite as memorable as it feels like it should be. But this was likely more of a technical limitation given how ambitious the rest of the game was for an n64 racer. The track designs themselves are all varied and loads of fun anyway.

I just came here to say that it is, in fact, better than Mario Kart 64 and in almost every way.

Also, please do not make the same mistake I initially did with the boosting. You have to let go of accelerate just as you're rolling over the boost pad, and then lay off of it until the green smoke tapers off unless you want to cut the boost short. This one piece of information makes the game a lot more forgiving and is 100 percent essential to beating the game. If you do not know this and practice it during the four main worlds, Wizpig is basically impossible to beat.

Mario Kart 64 junto al Smash 64 son los dos juegos a los cual más cariño y buenos recuerdos tengo de la 64 ya que fueron los juegos que más jugué con compas y vecinos en esa época, pero si tengo que elegir a mi juego favorito entonces ese sería Diddy Kong Racing. nunca probé su multi (ni siquiera sé si tenía), pero el modo historia era excelente y en lo jugable me gustaba mucho más que el MK64.

no es un secreto que la gen que menos me atrae es la de la 64 y PSX y por eso mismo luego de los 2000 nunca volví ni me intereso tocar algún juego de esas consolas, pero luego recuerdo a Diddy Kong Racing y me hace pensar en que debo de darle una oportunidad al catálogo de esta generación ya que si rebusco es probable que encuentre algo que me interese, pero solo es un pensamiento... dudo que en algún momento juegue o haga una review de algún juego de esta generación...

Pretty much all racing games on the N64 so far have the same problem: there’s not a lot of progression for a single player, and you can do everything in a couple of hours. Some of them focused on being great in multiplayer (like Mario Kart 64) but there wasn’t a lot of choice for singleplayer.

Which is where Diddy Kong Racing comes in, as it has a very meaty singleplayer campaign with an adventure mode where you find tracks within its hub world.

It’s a neat area to explore, although a lot smaller than I remember it being. You’ll find four doors with balloon requirements (which you get from winning races or finding them in the world), with a fifth world hidden until you defeat five bosses. They start out simple at first: you have to win each race individually then defeat the boss in a race. Do that, and it gets much more challenging.

You’ll be tasked with finding 8 coins in each race. However, finding them isn’t enough as you still have to win, and then defeat a harder version of the boss. Diddy Kong Racing is a difficult and brutal game and you’ll need to learn its tricks (such as letting go of the accelerator just before boosting) to have a chance of winning. Once you defeat a boss a second time, you then complete in a tournament across the four tracks. There’s also a key hidden in one level of each world to unlock a battle mode challenge. Oh, and also time trail challenges.

Once you’ve done all that and defeated the evil Wizpig, it’s time for Adventure Two. This is a mirror mode version of the game, although the silver coins are now in more difficult places. Of course, this amount of content wouldn’t be anything if the game wasn’t fun to play.

And thankfully, it is fun. Levels use three vehicles: car, hovercraft and plane. The car and plane are very easy to use, while the hovercraft is more difficult. When you repeat tracks (or choose to play outside Adventure mode), some levels let you pick your vehicle – with some restrictions on a per-level basis – and it’s great having multiple types of vehicles racing alongside each other.

One let-down in DKR are the characters. None of them are bad in terms of a design perspective – and this is the first appearance of Banjo (without Kazooie, although some of his voice clips sound like her) and Conker, but they’re a bit too varied in terms of ability, so the game’s difficulty will very a lot based on who you pick, with Pipsy being the best for hitting boosts (plus the silver coins).

The weapon system sets itself apart from other kart racers. Instead of giving you random items, the balloons providing items are colour coded for specific items. Collecting one of the same type you already have will also upgrade the item.

Diddy Kong Racing is still a great game, and the only kart game that’s come close to it for single-player is Sonic Racing Transformed (which also had three vehicle types, but it was specific to the part of the track you were on). It set itself apart from Mario Kart 64 and I actually prefer this one.