Slash, Nancy, Tommy and the crew are no longer cartoon caricatures, but realistically proportioned teenagers. Tommy has switched from comically portly to worryingly obese, Nancy filled out and Linda has either changed her name to Koyuki, or wisely sat this one out and substituted her twin sister into the tournament. Continuing a trend from SBK2, they each come equipped with their own faintly embarrassing back stories (Tommy, the fat fool, only entered the tournament to impress Nancy, but she has a thing for Brad!). Mercifully, once set up, their narratives soon lapse into between-bout playground insults, set a mere notch above a thirteen-year-old’s ‘yo mamma’ repertoire.

The core blueprint remains the same; this is a snowy, downhill Kart racer laden with items, weapons and snowboarding tricks. Most tracks are straight race-to-the-finish pursuits that require a minimum 3rd-of-4 positioning, a feat normally comfortably achieved. Trick matches add variation, and slaloms rely on accurate speed racing through time-extending hoops. With no analogue stick to provide the kind of gradual, nuanced steering that cuts into the depths of snow, the controls have been dropped slapdash onto the D-pad, holding Y to facilitate sharper turns. A satisfactory replacement at best and imprecisely awkward at worst, it leaves the player wondering how the potential of the touch screen could have been better utilised. As it is, tapping prescribed patterns on the screen when the trick bar is full performs the most daring and adventurous moves.

Tracks are lengthy, and for the most part, rather bland. Occasionally, a course seems to offer an interesting shortcut, but then nearly always turns out to be a misconstrued piece of scenery; as though on the cusp of creativity, the developers were suddenly silenced. It even ignores one of its greatest assets from the previous iterations - the enjoyably frantic jostle to board the chair lift between laps, that would quite often juggle the fate of a race on good timing and a pinch of luck, has been cut as the gate now allows all competitors to fit through simultaneously.

Outside of its cringeworthy context, the racing dynamics provide a competent, reasonably fun experience. Consistent with the game’s blundering maltreatment of its inheritance though, this has been totally overegged to the point where any enjoyment is almost immediately extinguished. The large, everlasting powerup containers conceal a bevy of devastating weaponry that will usually render your character paralysed in momentum or movement for the achingly long time that it takes to display the ‘Got knocked over, shake head, brush self off, stand up and get going again’ animation. Nearly all the weapons operate in the same way; that is, to automatically dispatch you from afar. What really grates is the brazen frequency with which these attacks occur, and your near helplessness in preventing them. Significantly, the most fun is had in the time-trialalike Slalom mode where you are freed from your rivals' constant slap-to-the-face disuptions. Once you’ve broken away from the pack, attacks are more sporadic, so that the first half of every race is a stop-start chore until you put some distance between your opponents. The only defence available (a move eked out from the instruction manual) is to perform a spinning trick, a difficult and risky manoeuvre to perform on solid ground when beckoned by a two-second warning.

Even more irritating are the recoveries that actually need to be manipulated. One requires you to shout into the microphone to wake your character up, and another to blow into the microphone to clear the screen of fog. One of the later bosses' entire attack scheme consists of using the fog weapon for the whole two-odd minutes of play, meaning you play blind or blow into the microphone for it all, whilst your unfocused eyes blur two inches away from the screen (thankfully for asthmatics, the pause button can still be used). Not that there’s more than one boss, it’s the same crude robotic Santa, he’s just slightly tougher and more annoying each time.

In the evolution of the Snowboard Kids franchise, the first games evoked the golden idyll of a playful childhood. Now, it’s as if Atlus has wanted to incite the player with the pointless undirected anger of an awkward pubescent teenager. Frankly, if this is the life-cycle of the SBK games then the series has peaked too early. If that’s the case, we look to a game in which Tommy, now too obese to race, spends his days flicking between infomercial channels and writing love letters to Nancy that he has no intention of ever sending, wistful for the glory days of yesteryear.