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.
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.