When one turns to face the screen, it looks almost as nice as the characters in the film Toy Story. The real time lighting effects are also impressive, but the prettiest things about the game are the incredibly polished and smooth characters. The environments are graphically superior to those seen in Banjo-Kazooie, and seem either the same size or bigger. Which character (there are five in all) you play as depends on which level you enter. The version of DK64 we saw is a small collection of levels from the game. At E3, we got a chance to put our hands on the game and the verdict was universally good.

DK64's intro is a five-minute rap that spotlights the game's cast, and has to be seen to be believed. Once you open them up, you'll resume in the beginning of the game, but with stages that are distinctly different for each character, respectively. Each of the five characters (Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Tiny, Chunky, and Lanky) has different moves, such as the female character's spin/float. There's some wandering, but there's a very obvious goal, and oftentimes, that means up! And it wouldn't be Donkey Kong if there weren't vines.' And there are vines, as well as other DKC elements like mine cart rides, and new features such as a coconut-shooting gun.

'The way the levels are laid out, it comes off like a 3D platform game. Nintendo's Ken Lobb says the game has a little bit of Banjo-Kazooie and a little of Super Mario 64, but that it'll definitely be its own distinct animal. Since the pak's required, it will be bundled with the game, for a price said by a rep to be no higher than that of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (US $59.99). All of this adds up to the game needing to be 8MB, meaning it'll have to have the RAM pak to function. In Donkey Kong 64, Rare is attempting to wow players with the size of the stages, the amount of animation, the number of characters, the number of textures on the screen, and real-time lighting effects. The original Donkey Kong Country for the SNES was impressive because Rare was able to introduce pre-rendered graphics to a 16-bit system.

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