Rare’s DS producer rescues DKR from oblivion
Not even a single clue about Viva Piñata DS yet
It has passed quite some time since Diddy Kong Racing DS was released, but there is still some chit chat about it in some nooks of the Net. Recently, DKRDS and Viva Piñata DS producer, Paul Machacek, shared some thoughts about Rare’s first DS title with Radio Ninty, probably because he’s not allowed to talk about VPDS until Rare manage to get a publisher for the game.
In a brief interview, Machacek points out that only two members of the original DKR team took part in the development of the DS remake: “The lead artist of DKR DS was also on the original DKR team. We also had some advice and consultation with the original game’s vehicles engineer,” he indicated.
He also refers to the critics regarding the changes and new features of the DS version: “There were a few odd things that I would have liked to do differently, but we feel that about every single game we write. Usually you manage to do things better on a sequel, but then find a new set of things at the end of that which you’d like to do better. The handheld team at Rare did a very good job getting DKR on the DS platform and improving it in many ways over the original N64. It had upgraded graphics/textures, more importantly it ran faster and more consistently with less frame drops, and various extra features that we added do seem to have been liked. There was a lot of focus on a small handful of issues which overlooked the game as a whole,” he stated.
When asked which were those things that he’d have done in a different way he added that he “would have liked to change the balloon pop challenge so that the touch screen wasn’t used to control the camera as well as pop the balloons.” He thinks that “a better option would either have been to control the camera with the d-pad and reserve the touch screen for balloon pops only, or maybe put the camera on rails, but I think the d-pad idea would have been best.”
Finally, when the unavoidable question about a possible sequel arrived, he declared “not being able to predict the future.” And that’s probably why we still don’t have a release date for Piñata DS…
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