King Kong wasn't supposed to be public domain, but while Universal was suing Nintendo over a Japanese person's poor grasp of the English language, Lincoln and Kirby did their homework and discovered that Universal had previously argued in court that King Kong was public domain, in order to get some sort of advantage in something or the other.
TrueNerd: Diddy Kong Racing has bananas laid out all over the course and picking them up adds to your top speed, and there are boost powerups, and stuff like that, so you need to decide which ones are worth going out of your way for. Assuming other characters don't beat you to them. IIRC.
There's no snaking. And there's no "rubber band" (which is where the computer players are allowed to defy the laws of physics and always hang on your butt, passing you if you make the slightest mistake, no matter how well you were driving beforehand). And the characters are fully polygonal, not made of five-frame sprites. DKR was much better than MK64, IMO.