Report: Shaun White to shred again

Last month, Ubisoft launched its first alpine sports game, Shaun White Snowboarding. Despite an avalanche of hype, the game wiped out with critics on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, earning less-than-gnarly respective scores of 63 and 62 out of 100 on Metacritic. GameSpot's own reviewer was even less kind, giving the two games just 5.0 out of a possible 10.

Despite the critical drubbing, Shaun White Snowboarding--which was also released on the Wii, DS, PSP, and PlayStation 2--has apparently enjoyed some degree of success. This afternoon the Reuters news service reported that the game sold 259,000 copies in the US in the two weeks after its November 16 launch. The figure, which was supplied by Arcadia Research analyst John Taylor, says sales of the game racked up $13.6 million during the month. France-based Ubisoft declined to confirm the sales numbers.

Taylor's research went even further than just overall numbers, with the analyst asserting that 40 percent of Shaun White's unit sales--or 103,000 units--were sold on Nintendo's console. Indeed, Shaun White Snowboarding: Road Trip for the Wii fared better with critics than its siblings, receiving a 79/100 meta-score from Metacritic and a 7.5/10 from GameSpot.

The aforementioned iteration was given particular praise for its compatibility with the Wii Balance Board, allowing players to experience a certain level of the physicality of snowboarding.

"Obviously, it's easier to replicate the sensation of boarding on the Wii because we have the balance board," said the title athlete, an X-Games champion and Olympic gold medalist. "However, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 there's a whole culture behind our sport and you can see that in the amount of clothes and boards and customization options in the game."

Although Shaun White's sales haven't made it a runaway hit, plans for a follow-up are already under way. "Now that I have the knowledge and I can speak to programmers better and I understand a lot more about what's possible and what's not possible, this will all help with the next game," White explained to the service.

For the time being, though, the official comment from Ubisoft is "no comment." "We have not announced any plans for future projects with Shaun," was all a rep would say on the matter.