Titanic adaptation

by ERIK LEIJON

It’s debatable whether it’s an honour or punishment, but Ubisoft Montreal has been tasked with adapting James Cameron’s wacky sci-fi opus Avatar for the XBox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii. Avatar is the distillation of a lifetime of weird thoughts wedged deep in the mind of the man who brought us Titanic, so it already has a dedicated following among sci-fi junkies, and confused stares from the rest.

I’ve seen the trailer, demoed the games and watched an online broadcast of Mr. Titanic himself awkwardly giving a long-winded, unscripted description of the storyline at this year’s E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles. I still have no idea what’s going on in James Cameron’s head, and Avatar feels like a very rich man bankrolling a bunch of ideas locked in his subconscious since childhood. It’s clear the T2 director grew up with an affinity for nature, a disdain for the military, and more than a few Roger Dean posters hanging on his walls.

Luckily for Ubisoft, one gets the impression the world of Avatar is just as easily translatable to the video game world as it is the silver screen. It’s your traditional good vs. evil story, with alien wood nymphs called Na’vi taking on a destructive and sadistic human corporation. Director Antoine Dodens ad his team (responsible for the 360 and PS3 versions) only used characters and settings conceptualized by Cameron, but since the game is a quasi-prequel (the rules of time only moderately apply on Pandora, the Avatar homeworld), the team worked on their storyline while the film was under production.

The playable demo Ubisoft unveiled at their heavily fortified office was shown on a television using Sensio 3D technology. Also a local company, Sensio makes televisions similar to movie screens that show 3D films. Avatar is the first game to use the technology, and will likely be the only one for some time since the screens are years away from being widespread. The 3D effects are created by making two regular overlapping screens. You get the impression that you can pinch the main character’s head, and while it certainly looks amazing, it doesn’t have a drastic effect on the gameplay.

In the game, you can play multiple characters. As an unknown human solider, the game is nearly identical to Gears of War and other third person action titles, except the setting looks more like an enchanted forest that houses unicorns rather than the scene of a violent civil war. As an evil soldier, you receive experience points for destroying nature, and dousing angry alien dogs with flames courtesy of a flamethrower. The end of the demo allowed me to play as the blue-skinned Na’vi, and that mission plays like a humdrum hack n’ slash.

Avatar is a strange world, and the movie might be too idiosyncratically linked to its creator to reach Titanic levels of success, but the games (including the much different Wii version) seem like they can float on their own.

Bust-A-Move is poppin’

After 15 years of popping, the bubble hasn’t burst on Taito’s Bust-A-Move series. Their latest is Space Bust-A-Move (DS/Taito, Taito), which is more of the same balloon-blasting fun. Not a puzzle game in the conventional, wit-testing sense, Bust-A-Move is more of an accuracy contest, as you attempt to hit coloured bubbles with a rotating gun.

Other than a few new power-up weapons capable of clearing many or all the bubbles at once, playing Space Bust-A-Move on the requisite endless mode isn’t much different from previous games in the series. The story mode has some interesting boss battles and special bubbles you can’t burst, but rather must get them to drop safely by popping the bubbles around them.