To kick off what will be a huge number of Video Game Reviews between now and well into 2016 we begin with an appropriately winter game, Snowboard Kids.

Snowboard Kids is a very cartoony snowboarding game in the same category as Mario Kart and often compared to the game as being Mario Kart on snowboards. The game featured a mix of traditional snow locations with a mixture of unconventional areas such as a Desert and an All Green Forest. It's easy to play but hard to master as the difficulty curve can be between cruel and downright unfair towards the end, certainly a game that's well remembered as one of the Players Choice titles in Nintendo's all time best sellers, rare for a 3rd Party title but the game isn't alone and many more of these will be brought up over the coming months.
Returning to the cartoonish charm its the characters that everyone remembers.
Slash is your typical male protagonist.
Jam is his typical best friend.
Nancy is very much the typical cute girl.
Linda is the older one who's a bit stuck up and wayyyy too young to look the way she does. (Look at her design and remember that she's one year older than the rest of the main cast who are all canonically ten years old in the first game)
and Tommy is the gentle fat kid who'd rather eat as many burgers as Mr Wimpy than snowboard.
And for hidden characters you get Ninjas, Demons and Penguins.
While for Sequel characters you get more stuck up rich girls, a girl genius, a child actress and a bodybuilder who loves himself but the five regular characters stay more or less the same except for a certain remake.
Mid 00s saw a small revival not really go to plan as a more anime styled game took to the Nintendo DS who at the time was seen as a last chance saloon to get old franchises restarted. While the gameplay was more or less the same, the characters went through some changes.
Slash & Jam came out more or less unscathed but Linda had been replaced by her younger brother Brad, Nancy became a cold rich girl and Tommy gained some muscles and became a bully type, needless to say the charm and the loss of Linda who in canon is not only the main instigator of the Snowboarding competitions but also the winner of the first game if the Playstation expansion story is to be believed was not welcomed by the fanbase.
Now I get why Atlus wanted to get with the times but there are better ways of doing it, what's best remembered about the Snowboard Kids is memorable character designs and timeless gameplay and for what it delivered in the face of it's rivals was really very good and deserves a proper come back on a big name console.
Current State: It was last seen as a revival attempt Nintendo DS game with not much going for it and Atlus haven't done much with it since, but Megami Tensei and Persona are doing better for Atlus so much focus is on those two succeeding rather than attempting another revival.
Why Should it be Revived?: Definitely should be revived as the Snowboarding genre has suffered a lot of damage from SSX's last release and needs either this or 1080 Snowboarding for it to come back as a serious genre again.
And as this is my last post before Christmas.
Merry Christmas from me.