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SSX 'Descent' sites registered
With Shaun White now taking it to the streets, perhaps there's an opening on the slope for EA's snowboarding franchise, SSX, to reemerge from hibernation. A mess of newly registered domains points to the possibility of a reboot of the series, which has been sidelined since 2007's pedestrian Wii release, Blur. Professional domain registration outfit Corporate Domains, Inc. (what a gig!) has locked down URL variations of "SSX: Deadly Descent," plus an "SSX: First Descent" domain -- suggestive of the popular reboot motif: the origin story. While none of this activity is confirmation of a new SSX game, EA has worked through Corporate Domains in the past in advance of public announcements, most recently to secure web real estate for potential Need for Speed names (though Hot Pursuit was ultimately recycled) and The Sims Medieval. As for SSX, it's been more than a year since EA Montreal's Alain Tascan left open the possibility for a new entry in the series, saying in September 2009, "If the market is there and is ready for a new one, then we'll consider it." Perhaps through Move and Kinect, EA Montreal sees its ready market and an opportunity to build on the motion-controlled framework established in its Blur effort. Of course, fans of the last-generation games might prefer to see the series' original developer, EA Canada, stage the comeback. And what a meta-comeback story it could be! (The studio could use a big win following the NBA Elite 11 fail, after all.) Still, all this domain fuss could just as easily be over the naming of the SSX iPhone game, which has been -- quietly -- in the works for too long.
