Silver Falcon posted:

Diddy Kong Racing is a kart racer with a story mode, starring Diddy Kong, Banjo, Conker, and various other Rare OCs that only appear in that game.

It has your standard light/medium/heavy split of character classes, drifting, items, boosts, and battle arenas. Except items can upgrade. You get items from different colored balloons: red, blue, green, and rainbow. Get a red balloon and you get a missile (basically a green shell). Pick up a second red balloon (without touching a different color) and you get a homing missile (red shell). Pick up a third red balloon and your missiles are fully powered up and you get 10 missiles. (So think like a triple green shell, except you get 10 of them). There's an element of strategy to it where you decide to use an item right away, or try to upgrade it.

Oh and unlike Mario Kart 64, there are different vehicles! You also get hover crafts and planes.

It also has challenges beyond "get first place in every course." There's the infamous Silver Coin Challenge, where you need to collect 8 Silver Coins scattered throughout the course, and then come in first place. They start out pretty easy, but pretty soon you end up having to go pretty out of your way to get them, so it becomes a challenge to claw your way back up to first place.

Imo it's a better game than Mario Kart 64, but not any later Mario Karts, of course. It's still an N64 game.

The DS remake of it is terrible because they didn't get the licensing to any of the original Rare characters like Banjo and Conker. Instead of replacing them with characters of a similar weight class, they just threw Dixie and Tiny in, and they were both "average" class like Diddy was. It made the roster a lot more boring. Oh and also to get a boost from the starting line you had to spin a fan on your touchscreen like cranking up a windup toy. I'm not kidding. It was extremely dumb.

Interestingly, Sony tried their hand at a kart racer on the Playstation called Crash Team Racing (CTR), and it was heavily touted as a "Mario Kart killer". As a child, I wrote it off as a blatant ripoff of Mario Kart and never played it.

Turns out it's a ripoff of Diddy Kong Racing. If I had known that I would have played it instead of ignoring it until the remake came out a few years ago. I love Diddy Kong Racing and CTR is also very good.