The Diddy Kong Racing DS thread

[quote name='johnnypark']So, DKR DS is going to be $20 next week at CC. To everyone who's already had a chance to play it, is it worth it? I loved the original, but the reviews have been pretty bad (seems mostly comparisons to Mario Kart, though, have brought scores down).

Thoughts?[/QUOTE]
Easily worth $20, it was worth the full price I paid for it. (to me at least)
 
Just snagged this today... PM'ed at Best Buy, threw down a $5 RZ cert, and walked out with the last copy of Diddy Kong Racing for $15 ;)

Can't wait to try it!
 
Just cracked it open myself. No bananas? Boo! Still trying to figure out the function of the coins. :lol:

Fun, though.
 
Ugh... I'm disappointed.

The racing is awesome, but fuck the stylus stuff. How am I supposed to spin the wheel with the stylus and then immediately start racing, stylus in hand?

And all the balloon popping stuff? I want to race, not pop balloons. It's not bad, but it's not great either.

Don't even get me start on the boss touch battles.

I'm going to play it some more before I write it off completely... the racing itself is awesome, it's just marred by a lot of non race bullshit.
 
Well, I'm done with Diddy Kong Racing, I think. Some more things I noticed -

- No individual karts. Everyone drives the same yellow and red kart, and while it can be upgraded, you don't ever actually *see* the upgrades. I guess every other game has spoiled me in that characters have individual karts, so you get to know a little about their personality and pick a kart that is your favorite... this brings me to point number 2:

- The game has no personality whatsoever. Sure, it's got Diddy Kong, but who are the rest of these characters? Why do I even care about them? The designs are pretty half ass, to be honest, and the voices are shit. I don't feel like I care about ANY of the racers.

- The control just feels a bit off... I feel like sometimes I'm fighting with the steering more than anything. It's espicially apparent in the hovercraft.

- I hate the stylus balloon popping shit. A lot. It's un-necessary and it seems the only reason it was put in was to say "LOOK WE'RE USING THE STYLUS AND TOUCH SCREEN!!!".

- Once you get behind in a race, good luck getting back to the front. I got hit with a missle, fell behind to 7th place, and never got past 7th place again.

To it's credit, the racing is ok, and the game has a lot of depth, but I don't feel like my time is worth investing in it. I'm pretty disappointed... I should have read review's first, because IGN's and Gamespy's reviews are exactly what I felt was wrong with this game.

It's just way too gimmicky.
 
[quote name='Dead of Knight']Sounds like they completely fucked up the gameplay from the N64 version, Roufuss. It's too bad. I really really loved the N64 version back in the day.[/QUOTE]

I can see why... the straight up racing dosen't seem to be that bad. I could see myself getting used to the controls.

But it's the bullshit nonsense DS stuff they put in just because they could which got to me.

I want to just race, I don't want to have to do some shitty balloon challenges over and over to get gold.

The graphics look like shit, too... Mario Kart DS looks damn good, imo, it looks like Rare actually made the graphics worse.

I really liked this game until I got to all the DS specific stuff, and I'm in the camp that really hates when games put that shit in for no reason at all. I only paid $15 for it luckily, and I can make that back.

It only took two hours for me to go "Hey, this game is kind of cool" to "Wow, this game is fucking tedious and the DS shit sucks". I'm sure someone will disagree with me, but all I wanted was straight up racing.

I forget to mention the upgrade system is confusing as hell too, and not really explained, and it takes a bajillion coins to get anything done.
 
Hmm...I've got about 4 hours on my game now and I have mixed, but mostly positive, feelings. I like...

-being able to upgrade vehicles

-the diversity of the vehicles

-how challenging the races get less than half-way into the
game...they make you fight for your win!

-the new weapon upgrades, they're very well balanced because they can be difficult to put together

-the open-endedness of the tracks, and plenty to be had for completionists should I ever be feeling maschostic

-the stylus-controlled balloon popping is actually kind of fun, if not on the easy side (unless going for gold). It's nice to see an attempt at something different.




I dislike...

-how many fucking coins it takes to upgrade vehicles, because some of the later races are downright impossible without the upgrades

-the new boost system for the beginning of races. I end up having to use my finger on the touch screen because it's rather difficult to go from stylus to instantly holding down the acceleration button, and I can still never get a huge boost in the plane or cart. I'm afraid this will make things a lot harder near the end of the game.

-since you control where you're looking on the carpet rides, sometimes I'll miss a balloon or a coin and end up dragging the camera to an undesirable angle on accident. It blows and can ruin an otherwise great run.

-the complete omission of silver coins kind of sucks. why not leave them in, but just add the carpet rides?? Adding content w/o removing old favorites would be much preferable, since those challenges are some of the hardest (and most satisfying) I've ever completed.

-most of the characters are fairly generic/lame, but I came to race, so I don't care all that much.

-the new voices are completely unnecessary. Taj used to have a goofy Indian accent, now he sounds like a British guy who's mother knew a man from India when he was in the 3rd grade and he's trying his best to imitate him but has no idea how bad it is.

Overall... it doesn't deserve the consistently and surprisingly low scores it's received. I say about a 6.5-7 is fair, and definitely worth the $15 I paid for it for a little nostalgia. Plus, online racing (which I haven't tried yet) will help me get over any complaints about less racing in the single-player because of the silver coins. At least there's still trophy races!

Try it before you buy it if possible, but if you can get it for cheap like I did, then it's even less than a budget title and fairly solid despite my gripes.
 
[quote name='johnnypark']

Overall... it doesn't deserve the consistently and surprisingly low scores it's received.[/QUOTE]

I disagree.

I didn't read any reviews before I bought the game (my bad, I feel pretty dumb for that), and after I played it for a solid 2 - 3 hours I went back through and checked out some reviews, namely Gamespy's and IGN's, and all their complaints were spot on.

This just feels like a 1st gen DS game, and there is much much better games out there to play. It's just lacking so much polish.
 
[quote name='Roufuss']I disagree.

I didn't read any reviews before I bought the game (my bad, I feel pretty dumb for that), and after I played it for a solid 2 - 3 hours I went back through and checked out some reviews, namely Gamespy's and IGN's, and all their complaints were spot on.

This just feels like a 1st gen DS game, and there is much much better games out there to play. It's just lacking so much polish.[/quote]

I agree to an extent, the standard of quality is pretty high for both Nintendo-published games, and for just about anything Rare has done for them, so I guess the short-comings are a bit harder to swallow when expectations are pretty high - that, and the 1st game was excellent just the way it was.

Eh, but I stand by what I said. Perhaps I wouldn't if I'd paid $30 for it the day it came out, but for $15 I'm content.
 
[quote name='johnnypark']
Eh, but I stand by what I said. Perhaps I wouldn't if I'd paid $30 for it the day it came out, but for $15 I'm content.[/quote]

I think for $15, probably not a bad purchase.

My thoughts on the game:

It's like Mario Kart Jr. not Mario Kart II

I'm not a big fan of the stylus stuff either.

One of my biggest complaints: I'm not one to play this kind of game for the adventure mode. I'm generally uninterested in it. You only get 4-tracks if you don't unlock them (I assume) via the adventure mode. This kind of kills it for me. I'm going to have to see if I can get one of my daughters to play and open up the extra tracks, etc.

I really hate the 'locked' stuff in games. I can sort of see it if it actually has something to do with the main game but so many games just lock it for the sake of doing so to get you to play the 'main game'. It annoys me.

One of the worst offenders of this was one of the versions of Space Invaders. The Classic Mode was locked. No good reason other than them wanting you to score some high number at the Lame Invaders version.
 
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