I'm gonna guess few people here have ever played the Snowboard Kids games for the N64 (there was a 1 1/2 game for the PS1 that was a Japanese exclusive, which made me livid), but I thought they were very fun, lighthearted kart-racing style games with interesting levels (tropical beach, haunted house, arabian desert, etc) that weren't really 'snowboard' accurate, but it was a very cartoony game, and I like cartoony most of the time. And I really liked the theme music all the courses had.
After years of waiting, a new game was released for the DS called SBK: Snowboard Kids. Nearly everything that made the first ones stand out were gone, along with other problems.
The only constant good thing I can say about it is that the controls were very tight and responsive, just as they should be. I had no problems with steering.
Gone were the crazy levels, and they were replaced by SSX-style snow courses in various real life countries, and I don't mean the courses from SSX 1 or Tricky, I mean the more down-to-earth, realistic type, which tends to make the tracks look very bland. Also gone were the theme music from each stage, instead its random, and there is only one piece of music that I think is okay, the others I think are crap.
The characters lost their cartoonish super-deformed style (a style that I thought was rather unique), and replaced it with a very, very generic anime style. The characters were now all from different countries instead of being school friends in the same town. Some of them had their personalities changed to the polar opposite of what they were before. Tommy was once a chubby, shy kid who liked burgers, and was generally friendly. Now he is a school bully from Canada. Nancy was the cute, sweet girl who all the boys had crushes on because she was so nice. Now she is a cold, condescending piece of barely legal ass from Britain whom all the boys still crush on because she's filled out and some of them want to change her cold attitude.....yaaaaaaaay. All of the characters' 'endings' at the end of hard mode are a single still image, sometimes showing that they got what they wanted out of the tournament.
The weapon system was broken. In the first two games, you got 'items' from blue boxes and projectiles from red boxes. Like in Mario Kart, they were random. Well, the blue boxes are back, but the projectiles? Each character has their own one unique projectile that you get chances to use when you do enough tricks. The problem here is that some characters' power is really, really good, and other characters' suck hard. So if you find yourself in front of Nancy, you will be under constant threat of the ice shot, one of the series' best projectiles, because that's all she uses.
The draw distance is astoundingly awful. The course itself will show up well enough for the most part, but the bigger problem is with the obstacles. One of the 'items' you got in earlier games were rocks (equivalent to Mario Kart's banana peels), they were the low class basic small dropped obstacle of the games. It's equivalent in SBK was the landmine, and because the draw distance of the dropped items is SO BAD, you might not even see it until its about 1/3 of a second in front of you. This also affects another drop item, the ice wall. And because there's a new system that allows you to improve your 'item' if you fill up a trick meter, you can drop BIGGER landmines and ice walls with similar shitty draw distance.
Similar to the draw distance problem, the 'incoming projectile' warning was worsened. In the first game, when an enemy projectile was coming after you, an exclamation point would appear next to your head a few seconds before it reached you, giving you a chance to jump over the shot. In 2, the exclamation mark would flash purple when the projectile was about a second away from you, and it added the ability to reflect projectiles with performing a trick, any kind, as the projectile hit you. In SBK, the exclamation seemed like it would only seem to appear if it was just a second away, giving you nowhere near enough warning time to try and reflect it. Yes, reflect, because now projectiles can no longer be jumped over, as their homing abilities have been changed from 1 and 2. And you can only reflect shots with a horizontal spin trick, and NO OTHER.
Speaking of tricks, they over-complicate them by adding touch-screen tapping to perform the good ones that earn you more points with which to use as currency in the shop. The tapping order or amount of tapping was almost always too much to do before the jump landed, leading to many crashed tricks.
As for the shop, you can buy 'cheats', many of which can be used in story mode with no penalty. So, that makes the game a bit more broken.
The entire experience of the game is so incredibly mediocre and disheartening. If it weren't for the fact that the controls were tight, which actually help the game feel playable, I would say this would be an almost complete 180 from the things that I liked about the originals. I rarely feel disappointed by games, but this would be, by far, my biggest disappointment.
