Diddy Kong Racing

About This Game

Gameplay

In Diddy Kong Racing, players can choose one of ten characters, who have access to three different vehicles: car, hovercraft and aeroplane. The car is an all-round vehicle, but it is the slowest on certain surfaces like sand and water. The hovercraft is designed for both sand and water areas, but lacks in acceleration and manoeuvrability. The aeroplane is designed to access aerial areas; it is good at acceleration and manoeuvring, but has the slowest speed. Each racetrack has a set of boosters known as "zippers" that temporarily boost the player's speed, as well as featuring regenerating balloons of various colours that provide power-ups. There are five different types of balloons: red, blue, green, yellow, and rainbow. Red balloons grant missiles to attack racers ahead, blue balloons grant a speed boost, yellow balloons grant shields to protect the player from attacks, green balloons grant deployable traps to delay other racers, and rainbow balloons grant a magnet ability that brings the player closer to the nearest racer. If multiple balloons of the same colour are picked up, the power-up is upgraded to a more powerful version.

History

> Nintendo enjoyed the fact that we chose Diddy Kong over Donkey Kong "Donkey Kong (character)"); I think that it was us trying to build on the fact that Diddy was ours, and DK was theirs [Nintendo's]. — Lee Musgrave in an interview with Nintendo Life, February 2014 Development of the game began after the release of Killer Instinct 2, in which a team was split into making Killer Instinct Gold for the Nintendo 64 and a new racing game for that console. During development, the game (initially a prehistoric time-traveller real-time strategy game) became influenced by Walt Disney World and soon evolved into an adventure game called Wild Cartoon Kingdom and later Adventure Racers, with which Nintendo had no involvement.