Shaun White Snowboarding

Ubisoft plans to return to Shaun White Snowboarding after the first game in the series sold more than three million copies.

It's the first face-off of the New Year and with it, the opportunity to bring the cold, hard, iron first of order to the games cupboard by rounding up the games we really should have covered by now, but didn't for reasons too numerous and too tedious to get into. It's also the chance to take a look at how the first high profile release of 2009 - EA's Lord of the Rings: Conquest - measures up under Eurogamer's unyielding scrutiny.

As we've got a lot of software to get through, we've bumped up the interesting games to the front of the feature, then grouped together the rest in the form of smaller, round-up featurettes at the end. However, as per the norm, all games get the full screenshot gallery treatment - captures losslessly derived from the HDMI ports of both consoles at full range 24-bit RGB precision. Where PS3 outputs a 1080p signal on any given game, additional galleries are provided, along with their 360 counterparts.

For the headline games there's also the customary video coverage. Set your Flash Player to 'high quality' to appreciate the full might of h264 encoding, or check out the author's blog if you want to download bandwidth-saturating full-HD versions running in real time, optimised for playback on PS3, Xbox 360 and dual-core PCs.

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Sony has stuffed the PlayStation Store with new content but there is still no sign of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.

Ubisoft has confirmed that two of its most recent PC releases have gone on sale in shops without any form of digital rights management software (DRM).

The internet is amazing. Look, here's what Wikipedia can tell you about Shaun White: "Shaun Roger White has been a notable competitor in professional snowboarding since he was fourteen... White was born with Tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect for which he endured two open-heart operations."

Wow! Now let's see what Shaun White can tell us about Shaun White, thanks to this interview on Heckler.com: "My perfect day would just be learning a new trick. That just makes the day. You know how it is, you skate a lot, if you try that trick all day and you finally make it then everything is sunshine after that."

Amazing! And hey, look at what I can tell you about Shaun White: turns out Ubisoft's Shaun White Snowboarding - hereafter referred to as Shaun White Waterboarding - completely blows. You might have been interested in it as a sort of snowbound Skate: a more weighty, precise alternative to Amped or SSX. It's totally not. It just blows.

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Ubisoft has expanded the stable of Shaun White Snowboarding games to include DS and PSP versions. Both will be released here on 14th November, alongside Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii versions.

Ambitious online piste action.

Ubisoft's first serious crack at extreme sports will boast online play that's "the first of its kind as far as snowboarding games go" - that's according to Shaun White Snowboarding art director Scott Mitchell, who's been bigging up his title to Eurogamer.

We're not sure what Ubisoft is feeding its developers over in Montreal, but these days its largest studio appears intent on supersizing every title it turns its hand to. Given the investment, and subsequent return - notwithstanding the game's polarised reception - on the tech driving Assassin's Creed, you can hardly blame the publisher for feeding the code into the Exploit-O-Matic 3000 to see what might wriggle out the other end.

Shaun White Snowboarding creative director Trent Ward believes the Wii Balance Board offers developers "worlds of possibilities".