Donkey kong jet race

The Gamecube’s bongo ‘em up, Donkey Konga was notable not only for having an excellent pun for a title, but also for being the brainchild of the team who went on to create Super Mario Galaxy. Donkey Kong Jet Race (known as Barrel Blast in the US) night not enjoy such prestigious game designers, but it is also a game designed to use Donkey Konga’s bespoke Bongo peripheral on the GameCube.

A kind of Mario Kart racing game, the game fits characters from the Donkey Kong universe with Bongo style jetpacks (no really) and, presumably, the original idea was to have players performing drum rolls to make their character move along the racetrack. Some awkward stop/starts saw the game abandoned before, in more recent times, getting picked up again for the Wii. Now Bongo functionality has been removed and the control scheme has been reconfigured to use the Wii’s motion sensors. This kind of ruins the whole visual premise of the game but, to be honest, that’s the least of its worries.

Where originally the game would have had you alternating hits between the sides of a bongo drum, now you’ll need to alternately raise and lower the Wiimote and Nunchuck rapidly to get up some speed. Characters are always moving forward but how fast they do so is down to your drumming motions. However, no matter how much of a sweat you work up, your character never really seems to move that fast – not even when controlling the supposed sprinters unlocked later in the game.

But that’s not to say the game is devoid of any sense of speed. As you race around the tracks you’ll need to collect banana tokens which feed into a boost bar. When this is filled you can fire off an explosion of acceleration that will, for a few seconds, propel you through the scenery. The boost only last for a very short amount of time but, if you manage to destroy any barrels while it’s firing it’s prolonged slightly.

This white-knuckle moment provides almost the only thrill in the package though. Most of the time you’ll be wrestling with the controls as you try to avoid obstacles (using a painfully inexact swipe motion) and despairing as yet another opponent sails past. Often the game will mistake a ‘run’ instruction on the controller for a ‘turn’ which is a huge frustration, to say the very least.

That said this is a well-stocked package with quick race, time trial, and grand prix career modes. Up to three friends can join in the experience and, in multiplayer, the game does improve somewhat. But despite the solid framework, the actual racing just isn’t that fun and players wanting a race game with a forearm workout are better served by Mario and Sonic at the Olympics and its ilk.