Played the Burnout Paradise demo yet? Stupidly good, isn't it? Since we got hold of the Xbox Live preview we've been having an almost illegally good time discovering the new delights of Paradise City. It's been a non-stop orgy of melting tarmac, leaping off carpark roofs, barrell-rolling across beaches and handbrake turning into parking spaces at 100 miles per hour.

What's got us extra excited about the demo though is something entirely unrelated to Burnout. While it was great to discover that SSX3's DJ Atomika has made a transfer over to Crash FM from Radio Big, we found our already sizeable grins doubling in width when said voice of extreme racing games mentioned getting a message from the one and only Mac Fraser.

To the uninitiated, Mac Fraser is a playable character in SSX3, arguably still the pinnacle of EA's gloriously extravagant snowboarding series. Mac's message? That the snow on the mountain is falling and should be ready to ride by winter. Now we might be wrong, but we strongly suspect that that's confirmation that the next SSX game is heavily in production. It's not clear whether Mac was refering to this winter just underway or the end of next year, but either way, if we're right then we might be due an announcement of a next gen installment of one of our favourite franchises very soon.