Sim, arcade, simcade, anything. I’m kinda disconnected from the genre and want to know what is considered the GOATs of racing games to try them out.

Me personally, I’d say Dirt Rally 2, very addicting gameplay.

  • Lightsong@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Diddy Kong Racing on N64. There’s no other that come close for me.

    You can use either vehicle, hovercraft or plane. Depending on the tracks. Some tracks you can try using any of them. Some are vehicle specific.

    You have somewhat open world for you to run around in any of those vehicles mentioned above.

    Like in Mario Kart, instead of boxes for you to hit to get items. You hit balloons, and they’re all colored with specific usages. Like red is a rocket, blue is a boost, etc. However, if you hit same color balloon twice or thrice your item upgrade. Like 1 red balloon = 1 rocket, 2 red balloons = homing rocket, three red balloons = 30 rockets for you to spam away. If you hit two different balloons, newest balloon override over your last. There’s no blue shell bullshit in this game tho, that’s either positive or negative for some folks.

    There’s mini games, one which I think is really underrated: Dino egg mini game , one where you have to grab egg, drop it in your nest and protect it until you hatch it. You can attack others and steal eggs. You need to hatch three to win the game. You have to find hidden key in one of racing track to unlock the mini game.

    And you get to face the boss of each area, each boss has their unique mechanics. You face them 1v1.

    Once you beat all tracks, you can do them again but with coin challenge where you gotta gather all coins and win the race. Some tracks are insane hard to point where you have to strategy which coins to take each laps and deal with other racers at the same time. And what’s the worse is the fact that other racers doesn’t care about coins. You have to get all coins and be in first place to clear the track.

    Once you beat all coin challenges, you get to battle bosses again which are harder, then you unlock the final boss.

    There’s also a tourney you gotta do in each area to unlock secret area with new tracks and harder final boss.

    That’s it? Nope, you get to start all over again with the tracks flipped and other racers are harder. Then you gotta do bosses, coin challenges too.

    And one final thing, prob one of hardest to do is time challenge. Beat that and you unlock final unlockable character. There’s two unlockable characters in the game.

    Imagine that single cartridge of N64 got all of this, this could have been much more if Nintendo purchase Rare. I could never get into Mario Kart because of Diddy Kong Racing. Compared to DKR, Mario Kart on N64 is a joke to me.

    I still play N64 from time to time, I love to replay Zelda games, banjo, etc and of course Diddy Kong Racing.

    • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I really like DKR but I was never amazing at it. Especially the boss races. Killer soundtrack though. I listen to it more often than I play the game lol

      In case you don’t know about it, there’s a cool site called Retro Achievements that has community-curated achievement sets for thousands of games (and leaderboards for specific tasks, like Mario 64’s Princess’ Secret Slide), and it integrates nicely with RetroArch and Dolphin (I haven’t looked into other emulators, but I’m sure there are other supported ones). It’s given me a great reason to play all my childhood games again, instead of playing them just to waste time.

      Speaking of BK, I finished that set just last night and it was so satisfying. I’m sure you’d make short work of the DKR achievements!

      • Lightsong@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        That’s pretty cool. But I don’t play on emulator. I still got original N64 and like 30+ games from when I was a kid. It’s still going strong. Had to buy new controller tho.

        • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Respect 👍 I still have all my old consoles and games from my childhood, all the way back to the NES. And I still collect classics that I didn’t grow up with. Hope you play yours on a good ol’ CRT :)

          • Lightsong@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Sadly no, I gave away my 42" CRT away to buddy’s relative who was poor and I didn’t have any space.

            It looks pretty bad in my 1080 ledtv. But even then, I still find myself replaying N64 games over and over.

            You know, I have like bunch of games on my pc but I can’t get hooked on any of them like I do for old Zelda games. Altho I did get hooked on botw and totk. Maybe it’s Zelda games.

            I need to find other Zelda-like games maybe. Any suggestions?

            • ProfessorProteus@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              The only Zelda-like I can think of right now is Tunic. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s a great game. It’s on PC and all the major consoles. I’d say it’s more like the pre-N64 Zeldas than the open-world ones. Also has an in-game manual that’s 100% inspired by the manual that came with the first Zelda on NES. Incredibly charming game.