SBK: Snowboard Kids

"Hee-ho!"

SBK: Snowboard Kids is actually the "revival" of a Nintendo 64 duo of sleeper hit snowboard games known simply as Snowboard Kids. While the old games offered a colorful world full of tons of cartoony snowboard replayability, SBK for the DS seems to have made a drastic turn away from its predecessors. Even when not compared to the previous two games, this new game offers very little variety and entertainment.

Each game mode is centered around snowboarding down a hill, like any snowboard game, but with a few added features to make the game more of a party game rather than a snowboarding simulation. You can pick up items to drop on the hill to blow up or smack into your opponents, and as you gain points by doing tricks, you will power up a "shot" that can be blasted in front of you to hit your foes.

Using this game engine, you are able to participate in a small number of game modes, each of which is almost identical to the next. In the "World Tour Challenge" mode, you will be playing versus matches, slalom runs, and boss battles in a series to complete stages and complete the game with your selected character. The other game modes -- versus, slalom, and boss battle modes -- just have you practicing these world tour stages one at a time.

Doing tricks or completing a stage will award you with points based on your trick complexity and stage completion time. You can use these points to make purchases in the "shop" area of the game, where you can buy new board designs, new stages, new character color schemes, a couple of new hidden characters, new types of shots, leveled-up boards, or som "cheats" to turn on and off. When you start the game, you'll be very limited to what you can do, so you need to build up points and buy things to increase the game's variety.

The downside to this, though, is that there really isn't that much to buy. Even once you buy the two new courses per game game mode, you won't even notice. Each course looks basically the same, you are racing down a slope in a city, and the background is mostly sky with an occasional building stereotypical to the country you're supposedly racing in. None of the courses have any shortcuts or interesting areas to race it, it's mostly just going downhill with a couple of turns thrown in to stop it from being too boring. Don't expect memorable areas as with other party racers like Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, ChoroQ Arcade, or even the old Snowboard Kids games.

Instead of learning button combinations for characters' special tricks, the advanced tricks have been replaced by the touch screen. While the touch screen tricks are interesting, it's difficult to move your hand from the buttons to the touch screen to rapidly tap all the targets required to pull off the trick before your character hits the ground. This is worsened by the fact that you have to be holding the B button and moving your character with the D-pad to get your character to jump off the slopes. This is very bad for people who want to use the stylus and not scratch at their screen with a fingernail.

The computer AI that plays against you is either smart or lucky, because every time you are about to go over a ramp, you will get hit by a shot. This adds a level of competition like playing against other humans, but later on it will get annoying, trying to gain the 999999 points to buy the last cheat set, only getting 10000 to 20000 per course, depending on the length and how well you can do your tricks and collect gems to get bonus time points at the end. Add that along with having to buy tons of other things for 10000-20000 points, and the fact that there are very few courses, all which look the same, you're going to be doing the same thing over and over again if you want to unlock this entire game.

You are helped out once you buy the cheat sets though. You can make yourself invulnerable to attacks and give yourself the ability to land perfectly no matter where you are in your trick when you the ground. You could even land on your face and be fine, grabbing up all the points for a completed trick. You can also abuse a simple trick glitch: as you're in the air, you can simply wiggle the directional pad as long and you're pressing one of the ABXY buttons, and your points will skyrocket -- even better than doing the special touch screen tricks.

As for the graphics and sound, don't expect much here either. The graphics are pretty nice, on par with other DS games, but since it's mostly just snow, there's not much to see. The sound is pretty good, but the songs aren't memorable or catchy. There are character voices, thanks to Atlus USA for taking the time to make an English dubbing of the game. The art style has changed from the old games, too, which many people consider bad, but it's mostly just different. The characters have gotten more bland, each in an angry fury to win as much as possible.

Multiplayer isn't very special, especially since you won't find many other people with this game to play with, and the game was released too early to make it onto Nintendo's WFC service. You'll basically be doing the same thing you do in the one-player game, but with other people. Because of the lack of options and course variety, it changes to a game of luck rather than a game of skill. Download play takes a long time to load, and you'll be playing one course as all the same character. The player with the game card will keep the cheats that he has equipped, and the opponents will get nothing.

Overall, the game is pretty bland, and you'll find that it feels like you are simply racing the same race many times over, and even that one race isn't all that fun. If you're not a serious gamer and would just like something to pick up and play now and then, and you don't worry about making sure you buy everything in the game, or you just want to get it with your friends to play on your lunch break or something, this would probably be a really great game. The competitive factor is low, and it can be fun for about 15 minutes at a time. If you're looking for a hardcore snowboarding game or a party racing game with a lot of replay value, or if you were a fan of the previous SBK games, you might want to be a bit hesitant in picking up this title. If you can rent DS games, try it out and see if you'll want to spend that much time with so little to do.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/23/06