Rare's Paul Machacek, producer of the DS title Diddy Kong Racer has answered some questions from visitors at RadioNinty. I think Rare should be commended for the amount of time they are putting into keeping the community happy and involved.

Radio Ninty : How did the DS version of DKR come about? Were Microsoft happy for you to do the project?

Paul Machacek : Microsoft is predominantly a software business that provides experiences for many types of hardware, some of that our own. Despite all of the interesting speculation on forums, there was never a dilemma in continuing handheld development as Microsoft were not competing in that space with hardware. So we carried on writing games for Nintendo's handheld systems culminating in the current DS.
As for DKR itself? Well, it simply ticked all the boxes. We had a range of criteria to meet and DKR was the best fit from all of our options. We believe that we've gone one better with the subsequent completion of Viva Piñata DS which will be released at a future date. I'm embarrassed to admit that this is an unusually sensible answer and hope you're not disappointed by the lack of comedy!

RN : Were any members of the original team involved in the DS version?

PM : 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.

RN : Why was the voice of the elephant changed?

PM : Times change and things that may have been acceptable 10 years ago are viewed differently now. Also, because the game was not a direct port and had many changes, we needed to record new speech and the original "artist" responsible was not available, so we found a suitable substitute and re-recorded the whole character again from scratch.

RN : A sequel using the same engine would rock the bells, any chance? And would it be possible to have ghost data savable?

PM : Thank you. Sales and good reviews always make us happy, but the individual players telling us that they like our games puts a smile on our faces. I'm unable to predict the future though. Watch this space.

RN : Did the game sell well?

PM : Yes, thanks.

RN : Were you disappointed with the criticism of the DS exclusive features, such as the screen rubbing and microphone bits?

PM : You can't please all the people all the time. 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.

RN : If you could change anything about the game what would it be?

PM : For me I 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. I feel 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.