Diddy Kong Racing Review

Diddy Kong Racing manages to incorporate the worst of both worlds. It is exactly the same sickeningly cute, single-player centric racer as it was ten years ago on the N64, but with enough pointless and inappropriate new features shoehorned in to sour the experience for anyone who might have enjoyed it back then. DKR was pretty unique as a multi-vehicle 'adventure-racer' in 1997, and it remains so now, but its visual style and design have aged rather badly, and the repetition inherent in its gameplay grates rather more today than it did back then. Its focus on single-player also means that the online multi-player falls rather flat, especially next to Mario Kart's riotously competitive racing. Worse, the touch-screen features range from mild irritation to insurmountably broken.

Rare's character design has always been a bit hit and miss, hasn't it?

DKR was something of a testing ground for Rare's N64-era heroes. Banjo and Conker both featured here before starring in their own games - Banjo without his backpack-dwelling companion, and Conker as a fresh-faced, irritatingly cute, squeaky-voiced annoyance devoid of any of the personality he later found in Bad Fur Day - but they've both been replaced here by Dixie and Tiny Kong (who I always thought were the same person, cunningly rebranded, but you live and learn). What's left is the dregs; Bumper the badger, Pipsy the mouse and a selection of other inconsequential characters with the customary differences in speed, control and acceleration. It was never the world's most inspired character design, but the years have not exactly been kind to it. The courses, too, now fall into the category of 'woefully cliched' - we've got Water World, Jungle World, Ice World, Medieval World and the secret Space World.

Working through these worlds in Adventure Mode involves racing all the courses and finishing first before facing a special boss - a giant walrus, say. In the N64 version, you were then challenged to do all the races again whilst collecting eight coins, but here, you're thrown into an on-rails minigame where you float around each course, popping balloons with the stylus. This is the first of the completely incongruous stylus features; it's inoffensive, but completely out of place and horribly repetitive after a while. After that, you race the boss, again, and then you race all of the tracks in order, again, to win the world's trophy, and after that the boss challenges you to a completely broken, stylus-based race that's like a cross between Kirby Canvas Curse and Mario Kart; you have to draw a path for your kart on the touch screen, periodically spinning a little tyre in the corner to keep up speed. Sadly the kart almost never follows the desired path, and spinning the wheel prevents you from being able to steer; the races are near-impossible to control, impossible to win and absolutely no fun. At least they aren't mandatory.

I mean, the Kongs are pretty bearable, but Pipsy the Mouse and the other rejects found here are just HORRIBLE.

To make all this repetition worse, Rare has introduced a new feature - unlockables. These must be bought with coins collected in races, and cost a fortune, meaning that you'll have to race the courses even more times if you want to buy anything good. There's a lot of stuff in there, from new courses to vehicle upgrades to miscellaneous things like a sound effects recorder, which enables you to record yourself shouting various creative obscenities for every in-game effect. Sadly, that might just be the best thing about the game