The latest lands the Pandorian-plundering humans on the iPhone, pitting them against your playable Na'vi avatar in a story set years before the film's narrative.

After coming away from the 360 version feeling as though I'd completed a pretty, but below average third-person shooter, I wasn't expecting much from this iPhone app. To my surprise, though, this version, buoyed by varied gameplay and mostly solid platforming action, gives its console cousins a run for their Unobtanium.

Loved
No Typical Tie-in: If you've played any number of film-based iPhone apps, you know many merely serve as one-note marketing tools, light on gameplay, big on movie hype. Avatar forgoes this in favor of a full-on console quality experience. Coming in at about eight hours, the campaign features a variety of gameplay scenarios, missions, power-ups, boss battles, and story-driving objectives. From battling mechs and piloting Banshees, to platforming through Pandora and rail-grinding down tree trunks, there's lots to do in this miniature paradise. Additionally, light RPG and puzzling elements nicely complement the experience, as does a pop-off-the-screen visual presentation. The combat consists mostly of leaning on the attack button, but this lack of depth is easily outweighed by a carefully paced experience that's always giving you something new to do.

Prince of Pandora: One of my biggest complaints about the console versions was that their Na'vi's acrobatic abilities seemed stunted given their athleticism and familiarity with their surroundings. This is a non-issue on the iPhone, as your big blue packs the sort of platforming prowess that'd turn the heads of the Persian Prince and Laura Croft. You'll spend as much time climbing, jumping, shimmying, rail-grinding, and swinging than you will running and gunning. The inventive level designs, complete with moving platforms, vines, and climbable cliffs, demand your acrobatic skills be as strong as your aim.

Hated
Nose-diving Na'vi: As much as I enjoyed the focus on acrobatics over ass-kicking, this aspect also yielded the title's biggest flaw. Even the most polished platformers suffer from the occasional frustrating moment when you can't stick a jump due to a bad camera angle, finicky controls, or inaccurate depth perception, so it's no surprise an iPhone app, with its tiny display, fixed camera, and touch pad, gives way to multiple death dives. These moments by no means ruin the overall experience, but I can think of at least a half dozen times when fun was eclipsed by frustration due to a platforming roadblock. And, given the pricey platform, you can't curb your occasional aggravation by chucking it-as you might a less pricey controller-across the room. The saving grace is frequent checkpoints, allowing you to fall to your death multiple times without ever having to replay long stretches.

Following Avatar's average console entry and other movie tie-in's lackluster debuts on the iPhone, I was pleasantly surprised by this app's brimming campaign, complemented by varied gameplay and a refreshing focus on platforming over combat. Despite a few frustrations, it works well as both a companion to the film and a standalone interactive experience, making it the best film-tied title to hit the App Store yet.

Avatar: The Game was developed and published by Gameloft iPhone on December 14th. Retails for $9.99. A code to download the game was provided by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed the game's campaign.

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Avatar is the $300-million (or so) new movie from the director of Terminator and Titanic, a futuristic amalgamation of Cameron classic Aliens and Kevin Costner white-man-joins-the-Native-Americans movie Dance With Wolves. It is an American movie transparently critical of the United States of America, one that is simple in both good ways and bad. It is beautiful in ways only good, and, yes, in that roundabout way, it says something about the future of video games.

The movie occurs midway through the 22nd century, as wheelchair-bound grunt Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) assumes the mission of his deceased brother, shipping out across the universe to the planet Pandora, where a private corporation has enlisted both scientists and a private military to help them obtain a nearly priceless element unironically called Unobtainium. The military forces, led by the scarred and scowling Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) itch to clear the planet's best site for mining by blasting away the natvies who live on top of it. These natives are the tall, skinny, blue-skinned cat-like Na'vi, who live in the massive tree on that site and are the visual signature of the film. The scientists, led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) utilize Avatar technology, enabling Augustine, Sully and others to transport their consciousnesses into artificially-created Na'vi bodies and walk among the natives in the hopes of establishing either an economic trade or peaceful motivation for the Na'vi to move.

Early in the film, Sully, in his Na'vi body, is separated from his colleagues, lost to the wild and rescued by a Na'vi chief's daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). What follows is a film about Sully's education of life amid the Na'vi, the battles that erupt between humans and natives and a crossroads decision about who is right and with which sides the key players will align.

Loved
A Beautiful Place: Whether you watch Avatar in digital 3D, as I did, on IMAX or even in the plain old-school way, this is a movie of tropical-vacation beauty. It is an escape, on this planet Pandora, to an imaginative ecology of many-legged horses, helicopter bugs, hammerhead elephants and a variety of magical plant life that is so lovely that the setting alone has motivated me to try the Avatar console game, a game for which no demonstration of gameplay nor review had motivated me to play. If a video game can be my own transport back to this world, I will suffer through the reported mediocrity to see those plants and animals again. This is a dream world and the ultimate Al Gore planet, a combination of a lush green paradise and Internet-like network of natural electricity, a place to which I am eager to return.

A Beautiful People: The Na'vi have been created with the reverence many North Americans now have for those tribes that lived between the Atlantic and Pacific before our ancestors and forefathers squeezed them into reservations. (Speaking of which, see our sister site, Io9, for an excellent exploration of the "white guilt" in effect here.) They are also digital marvels, an impossibly lithe but visually believable band of hunters and shamans whose every tradition, from wrangling their versions of horses and hawks to climbing their floating mountains is a thrill to watch. Neytiri indoctrinates Sully into many of the aspects of Na'vi culture, nearly all of them a delight to witness.

A Video-Game Simple Hero: James Cameron, ever the romantic and skeptic of corporate power, presents in Avatar a love story intermingled with a morally clear struggle between those who would spoil a paradise and those who would not. It's seldom unclear who it is we should be rooting for, even though it is doubly awkward, watching this movie in the U.S., to realize early that the bad guys are not just the humans but those types of humans who would both violently shove native peoples from their lands but invoke a "shock and awe" military campaign in the interest of securing access to a foreign land's natural resources.

Some of that narrative simplicity is due for valid criticism, but what works well is the blankness of some of Avatar's characters, particularly Sully himself. Avatar, more successfully than any other film I can recall, embraces the simplicity that characterizes many video games, which infrequently portray emotional depth among its protagonists. Games, I believe, do this as a means of transporting a player more smoothly into their worlds. In games as in Avatar, the lead character often feels less like a real being than like a vessel, even compared to a usually more believably fleshed-out supporting cast. The lead role is left more blank, so we might more easily see ourselves in it. So is the case in this movie, on multiple levels. If Sully's Na'vi body is the personality-less form through which he can vicariously experience the Na'vi's world, then his blank personality — he is, like a game character, defined more by his options for mobility (as a human only in a wheelchair, in his case) than his personality — allows him to be a vessel through which a movie viewer can vicariously experience his world. He is, as a movie lead, as blank as a gaming hero, which serves the mission of transporting consciousness into a foreign avatar well in this film, as it does in so many games, from BioShock to Zelda.

War With Mech Warriors: When it's not being an extraordinary documentary for an exotic environment that does not exist, Avatar is a war film. It's a high-tech, special-effects battle between Na'vi and the machinery of future human war. The battles are incredible, full of natives, animals, planes, space marines and walking mech suits controlled, too, like video games, in this case with their cockpit drivers using gesture control to make their mech fire a gun or throw a punch. The battles are exhilarating, though hopefully you don't mind rooting for human death at the hands of the natives.

The 3D:I'm not sure I was cognizant of it all the time, but watching the movie in 3D appeared to add depth to Avatar's already extraordinary visuals. This movie, as alluded to above, can feel like a vivid nature documentary and the 3D allows one to further the illusion that we're in there. It never felt gimmicky, as the movie doesn't waste much time trying to pretend to throw things out from the screen into your face.

Hated
Transparently Political: Avatar makes Titanic look subtle. Cameron's last film was a romance, a disaster movie but also an allegory for the triumph of American self-realized ingenuity over the inherited privilege of old Europe. This movie is a guilty fantasy of Native American resistance against American occupation of the continental U.S. That's tolerable, as is the light overlay of climate politics that admits that distant Earth, where war has been waged in oil-rich Venezuela and Nigeria, is now devoid of green. But it strains patience to listen to Avatar's private American military commander promise a "shock and awe" campaign as he vows to "fight terror with terror." Stopping short of naming Saddam Hussein, the anti-science, bad-guy human commander declares that "our only security is a pre-emptive attack." I get it. But George W. Bush is not president anymore, and the equivalency of the war in Iraq with terrorism is the kind of blunt politics that I wish the makers of good science fiction would relegate to less sophisticated artists.

Rushed Story:Avatar treads much ground in introducing the viewer to so many places and cultural aspects of the Na'vi people. It skips an explanation for most of its science and relies on a sci-fi approach to YouTube to explain some of its plot and characters. That's fine, but it leads to so much that is unexplained that the movie feels hatcheted and crammed into an acceptable theatrical viewing time in advance of what I expect would be much longer director's cut. I'm not sure added exposition will improve the movie, though I do hope it plugs a logic hole that opens up two-thirds of the way into the film, when an event occurs that strains belief and that, unless they have a better explanation for it, probably should have spelled the doom for our hero characters right then and there.

Avatar is the fantasy of a new world and a revised way America could have or still can affect the old world upon which we live. It's also a light exploration of the possibilities of gaming, of being in another body and using its form to affect others. At times, in Avatar, doing that by getting in the seat of a mechanical warrior suit, is only a means to the destructive end, a successor to today's joystick-controlled Predator missiles and other tools of remote high-tech war.

But also in Avatar there is the promise that virtually inhabiting other bodies could bring us new cultural insights, could empower us beyond our physical limitations and could enlighten us to a new way of being. These are ideas that are more ancient than video games, more spiritual than a PlayStation, but they are ideas that we gamers have at our fingertips almost every day. Our future could be blue like this, in the happiest of ways. Avatar, the movie, represents a preview of that transformational and transportive possible future.

Avatar was written and directed by James Cameron and released by 20th Century Fox on December 18 in the U.S.

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Then again, some Rock-em-Sock-em Robots stumbling all over each other might be more enjoyable than this game, which had had a rough first week's reception, and these things rarely get any better.

Video Game Letdown [The Tonight Show, thanks Edward M.]

Much like the company's sales results call earlier this month, today's Ubisoft earnings call was all about the big-name franchises in the company's lineup. Along with mentions of upcoming games Splinter Cell: Conviction and James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, the strong early performance of Assassin's Creed II was a point brought up time and time again by CEO Yves Guillemot.

"First week sales of Assassin's Creed II, up 32%, with positive initial indications for the second week, combined with an overwhelmingly warm reception from gamers, validates our strategy of developing bigger franchises."

If fact, Guillemot even uses AC2 to soften the blow of the mixed performance of Ubisoft's Wii lineup.

"Based on this initial data, Assassin's Creed 2 looks well positioned to outstrip targets while our Wii games have got off to a more contrasted start in a less predictable market. Finally, sales of James Cameron's Avatar : The Game should benefit from the launch of the movie which is expected to be the biggest blockbuster of this holiday season."

Despite the fact that Wii games made up 22% of Ubisoft's sales during the first half, Guillemot continuously referenced the console in regards to underperforming titles throughout the investor conference call that accompanied the announcement. ""We have some Wii games performing inline, with some underperforming," Yves explained, noting that, ""We're still facing a challenging environment with uncertainties on the Wii."

Overall, the financials were down all around, with a large drop in sales and an operating loss of €78 million, mainly due to mixed Wii and DS game performance and a lighter release schedule.

Update: This post has been updated to more accurately reflect the information presented in Ubisoft's earnings call.

The action-shooter Avatar: The Game hits on December 1, tying in to the upcoming movie of the same name from James Cameron. The film and the Xbox 360 / PS3 versions of the game will support 3D visuals, utilizing the more advanced digital 3D techniques that are intended to supplant the old cardboard-glasses anaglyph approach that worked with any old display.

To experience Avatar in 3D through the video games, users will need to have 3D-compatible TVs. Otherwise they'll be playing the game in its non-3D mode.

But 3D TVs are not something many folks have. Some day, if Ubisoft is right, we'll wonder how we coped without them.

Here is Yannis Mallat, head of Ubisoft Montreal, where the Avatar games are being made, from an interview with the Financial Post:

"3D is to pictures what Dolby Stereo was to sound," he said. "No one wants to go back to mono."

Sony, as we reported recently, is also pushing 3D TVs and 3D games as a big thing for the near future.

Back in the summer, I wore 3D glasses while watching Avatar being played, maybe for five minutes. And I've played a side-scroller from Blitz Games using similar digital 3D technology. Both required 3D TVs. AndbBoth were impressive, moreso for how much depth into the TV they presented, rather than for what you often expect 3D to get you: Stuff flying out toward your face. But I don't feel that I've had enough time with 3D set-ups or the games built for them to say whether Mallat is just providing hype or if he's on to something.

And without owning a 3D-compatible TV, I don't think I can assess what he's talking about any time soon.

Ubisoft counting on future of 3D gaming [Financial Post]

Square Enix and Microsoft set up the Register - Tweet - Win event earlier this month, and the retweeting goal has been reached, unleashing an Xbox 360 Final Fantasy gift for everyone to enjoy. Yes, it's a chocobo toy for your Xbox Live Avatar! Joy of joys!

Kicking yourself now that you didn't participate? It's okay, you don't have to participate to partake. Simply head over to the special Final Fantasy XIII splash page on Xbox.com, register, and watch for your chocobo code to arrive later in the holiday season.

The main thing I walked away from this video with was a desperate yearning for a new Panzer Dragoon game. I'm not talking Panzer Dragon Saga II or anything - just me riding a dragon around a fantastic fantasy world, doing some stuff. There's not a Panzer Dragoon fan out there that could watch the flying bits of this vid and not feel the same way.

Nowhere is the realization of flight grander or more satisfying than in video games. When done right, flying in a game can leave a lasting impression on both players and developers that impacts every game they play or make going forward.

Telltale Games designer Mike Stemmle pointed this out while demoing Tales of Monkey Island Episode 3 for me in September. I asked what gameplay inspirations helped him develop for Monkey Island and after a moment's pause he said, "Kingdom Hearts."

"Oh, because it has pirates?" I asked.

"No," he said. "It's the flying." The way the game introduces flying the player -– about halfway through its storyline after you've been running and jumping on the ground the whole time -– was like a revelation in game design for him. "Because once you get [to fly in Never Land], it's like you knew it was coming. It just felt right."

There's a fantasy fulfillment that comes with flying in video games. And even if flying in a game is just another way to get from point A to point B, it's appealing to a part of your senses that you don't use very much in everyday gameplay.

"We live in a very X, Y world," Dark Void Senior Producer Morgan Gray said. A veteran of flight games like X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and X-Wing Alliance, he knows his Z axis and isn't afraid to build his games around it. "If you look at … shooters, when they first came out, everything was flat. [There was] a roof over your head and walls on all sides. It was only really when you got to games … where you had enemies [above or below you] where you had to start exploring the Z axis."

Like Doom players that had to learn to use the mouse to enjoy Quake, your average gamer has to put in effort to master flight. Instead of thinking in only one or two directions, he or she has to think in a 360 degree bubble where enemies can come from any angle. They have to be aware of their character's (or aircraft's) physics so that they don't get lost when trying to execute a turn. Some games make it easier for the player by limiting the range of flight to forward-only like Star Fox or Panzer Dragoon; other games like Dark Void layer on tutorial after tutorial to make absolutely sure you internalize the controls before cutting you loose in the wild blue yonder.

By that same token, developers without Gray's flight-filled background have to work a lot harder to implement flying. Whereas Gray can look back over both his career and his childhood and see Chuck Yeager's face mocking him after Gray had crashed and burned in Advanced Flight Training, some developers only have memories of Star Fox or Wing Commander as their flying inspiration. They don't realize that there's more to flight than getting off the ground.

"Don't get me wrong," says Gray. "[Wing Commander's] level design was great, the ship design was great, progression was great. The actual nuts and bolts of flight? All pretty arcade-y because [it didn't feel] like there was meat to the simulation."

Developers with traditional level-making experience on shooters or adventure games that have the walls on all sides and the roof overhead have new challenges when making an enjoyable flying sequence or full game. They have to relearn how to organize a level around enemy spawn points in spaces with no walls or roofs.

"You really need to use enemies not only as a way of making a challenge for the player, but as defining space because [players] have to have that frame of reference for ‘where am I in the terrain?'" said Gray. "If you get [the timing right], it really gives the [flight] meaning and puts a plot to the [enemy] encounters. It's different than ‘And now we walk you in this room and find the blue key,' because you don't get blue keys in the air."

He compared a perfect flight level to a map called De Dust in Counter-Strike. To him, it was obvious that some developer had sat down with a stopwatch and timed how long it would take enemies to reach players when spawning from two different points on the map. That developer knew exactly where the player would be and what they would be doing when the enemy got to them, and they build the level outward around the player from that point.

Flying levels, Gray said, should be built the exact same way.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the upcoming Avatar for the Wii. A flight level with a giant lizard bird was the centerpiece of a demo given to me by creative director Daniel Bisson and he wasn't shy about telling me it was the hardest level to design. In early efforts, the enemies spawned too fast and the Wii Balance Board was over-responsive to even the slightest shift in weight, causing the lizard bird to pitch wildly and slam into spawning enemies. As the level developed, they added more environmental boundaries like tunnels and trees to define the flying space and confined 360 degree movements to quick time events.

So what began as a flying level instead turned into an arcade-style on-rails experience. Sure, you're up in the sky on the back of a bird. But, there's not much fantasy fulfillment and no raw freedom in having your hand held.

The trick is keeping reality from ruining fantasy. Yes, it's a lot of work to pilot an X-Wing in the Star Wars: Battlefront games; but if you get to blow up a TIE Fighter as a reward for your patience, you don't mind sinking effort into learning how to be a pilot. Likewise, War in the upcoming Darksiders would look silly with a pair of wings sprouting from his burly back; but hijacking a gryphon from an angel for a quick joyride through a ruined city appeals to the fantasy of the character and doesn't last so long that the game needs to bog the player down with real physics.

Above: The lone flying level in Darksiders.

With Crimson Skies and flight sims on side of the spectrum and our Star Foxes and Panzer Dragoons on the other, there are so many ways gamers can fulfill the fantasy of flight. Each new game that introduces a flying segment or builds its entire experience around the thrill of strapping on a jetpack builds on the collective fantasy gamers and developers share of taking to the skies.

The ultimate dream of flight in games, says Gray, is this: "I don't know where I'm at, but I'm having fun."

Image Cred — Kingdom Hearts
Title Image: The Fall of Icarus, Peter Paul Rubens, 1636

Saith the Infinity Ward community manager:

"Uploading a bunch of #MW2 avatar gear to XBL tomorrow, including this full GHOST outfit!"

Bowling clarified for me that "uploaded" does in fact mean available to you, the gaming public. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like these will be gratis. "I asked for some to be free but was denied." he told me.

Modern Warfare 2 Avatar Goodies Heading to XBL, PS3 Themes Soon [VG247]

As Cameron puts it, Pandora is really the garden of Eden, and humanity is here looking for apples. Behind all of the special effects wizardry and lush visuals, the story is really a heavy-handed tale about humanity encroaching on the wilderness and how stepping into the shoes of those we encroach upon will change or perception and potentially our actions. Still, very pretty world. I'd pillage that for resources any day.

Unfortunately, you can't get much of a feel for how nifty the flying is without watching someone flail around on the Balance Board. But the scenery is lush and the stealth gameplay is easy to see. Note how the prompt shows you to swing the Wii Remote a certain way to pull off an attack — that can be quite the stealth-wrecker if you get it wrong.

Enjoy!

Video Games | Avatar | Banshee Gameplay Featurette

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Video Games | Avatar | Navi Gameplay Featurette

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Answer: It denies it ever made that promise.

Unlike the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game, the Wii version of Avatar deliberately avoids the main plot of the movie and puts players in the shoes – or sandals as the case may be – of the story's antagonistic alien race. Also, it seems a little more kid-friendly than Cameron's film (although Avatar hasn't been rated yet).

What Is It?
Avatar on the Wii has players taking the role of the alien Ryuk, out to recover artifacts stolen from his people and rescue natives of his planet held by Earthling military types. The game has optional Wii Motion Plus and Balance Board functionality and features drop-in/drop-out cooperative play where Ryuk's sister joins the fight.

What We Saw
I played the tutorial level, level two in co-op mode and a flying level from a little later in the game.

How Far Along Is It?
The build I saw was pretty early days, but Ubisoft says the game is on track to come out a couple of weeks before the film's release in December.

What Needs Improvement?
Co-op Is Painful On The Ground: Rather than splitting the screen, the co-op in Avatar orients to one player and keeps both on the screen at all times. In ground-based levels, this is tedious if your partner keeps messing up jumping puzzles, or if you're trying to aim a ranged weapon somewhere farther along the path of the linear level. Also, there's an unfortunately bug where the camera gets confused about which player is the leader made it even worse.

Avatar Film Spoiler Warning

Oversimplified Plot Leads To Uncomfortable Implications: Cameron says his film is delivering a profound message and from what I saw of the Wii cut scenes based on plot points from the film, I gather that message is one of pro-environmentalist/anti-racism. Kind of like Fern Gully, only with aliens instead of pixies. The problem with the Wii game is that it has to oversimplify that message to create viable gameplay. So rather than exploring both sides of the "Hi, we need your planet" equation, the game just drops a bunch of humans into levels and tells the player "These guys suck, kill them all." On a surface level, this comes off as clumsy and boring – but if you're approaching it with an understanding of the message Cameron's film is trying to get across, I imagine it's just uncomfortable and sad.

End Spoiler

What Should Stay The Same?
Co-op Is Awesome In The Air: There are several flying levels in the game that allow you to hook up the Wii Balance Board and wing it or just sit back and point your Wiimote at the screen. Either way, you're expected to maneuver past obstacles, score pickups and shoot at stuff. On the Balance Board, this is more complicated because the flying creature responds to shifts in your weight to go forward, back or tilt for hard turns – meanwhile, you're still pointing at the screen with the Wiimote and mashing buttons to shoot or perform quick time events. The whole experience is a little overwhelming, which is why having a second player in co-op to handle the shooting is awesome. Bonus, you don't get any of those pesky camera issues from ground co-op.

It Feels Like Assassin's Creed: The combat in Avatar follows the three basic principle of Assassin's Creed – stalk, attack, evade. The only difference in Avatar is that you don't have a little meter to tell you when your cover is blown; instead you get little icons above the heads of the humans that may or may not be on to you. Using talk grass or high vantage points, you sneak up on them one by one and get the drop on them with quick one-hit kills. Then you slink back into the shadows to evade anybody who might've noticed you. It's old hat for Assassin's Creed fans and totally in keeping with the environmentalist commando them of Avatar. Bonus – if your stealth attack goes tits-up, you can pull off combo melee attacks with rhythmic swings of the Wii Remote.

Auto-Stealth: You don't have to press any buttons to pull off stealth – just walk into an area of shadow or tall grass, or spring up into a tree. Humans on this planet are cursed with poor eyesight and a limited range of neck motion apparently.

Final Thoughts
I haven't seen the 360 or PS3 version of Avatar, so I'm not sure how the Wii version stacks up in comparison. On its own, though, it's an ambitious game with some good ideas. But it still needs a lot fine tuning and polish to pull it all off.

Note: This image appears to be from either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 version — but it shows off both the bird you'll be flying and the helicopter at which you'll be shooting.

That's two weeks before the movie hits theaters. The game will be available on Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, DS and PSP. As website Joystiq points out, the PS3 and PC versions will be 3D if players have the necessary set-up.

Anyone getting Avatar The Game? Interested in Avatar The Movie?

Avatar [Ubisoft via Joystiq]

The PSP installment of James Cameron's Avatar places the player in the role of one of the giant, blue-skinned Na'vi warriors after the RDA has destroyed his village. From the description in the magazine (as reported by IGN), the game sounds a great deal like the Wii version we reported on previously. One feature that stands out, however, is the ability to transfer "Effort Points" from the PSP version to the PlayStation 3, augmenting your characters in the console version.

PSP to PS3 connectivity? That James Cameron sure knows how to exploit untapped resources.

Avatar PSP Details [IGN via Joystiq]

Avatar for the Wii puts you in the role of a Na'vi warrior, meaning a stronger focus on melee combat and a little bit of stealth. During our hands-on time with the game, we crept through the tall grass while taking out those pesky RDA soldiers with our Na'vi staff and bow, requiring much Wii Remote waggling and careful aiming, courtesy of the Wii MotionPlus accessory. While it may not look quite as good as its higher-definition peers, the Wii version of Avatar: The Game has something the other entries don't.

That would be two-player same screen co-op, which allows a second player to join in as a female Na'vi soldier. When a fellow member of the press hopped in mid-game, it appeared that both Na'vi players used the same set of moves. That presented a bit of an obstacle, as the camera didn't quite know what to do in a two-player situation when one of us was trying to aim his or her bow.

Hopefully that's something Ubisoft is aware of and tweaking, as the two-player mode has its benefits—namely the cooperative revive technique.

When my Na'vi was defeated by an RDA soldier in one of those hulking AMP suits, my partner helped revive me, letting us double team that massive exoskeleton. While I was attacking the thing, my partner sneaked into the tall grass, reviving his character with one of Pandora's life giving plants, then finished the AMP suited invader from behind. It worked, but not without some hitches along the way.

The Wii version of James Cameron's Avatar: The Game definitely looked sharp, if you're thinking of going with the motion controlled version. It should ship on or about the same day as its more visually detailed brothers, should you and a friend want to fend off that human invasion of Pandora together.

Today Bethesda confirmed that WET, Wheelspin and Medieval Games will all be playable at the show and that they will be talking up Brink.

Ubisoft's list of games at Gamescom includes Avatar, RUSE, Silent Hunter 5, Red Steel 2, Rabbids Go Home, Academy of Champions and Assassin's Creed 2.

With games like Modern Warfare 2, RAGE and APB on the offering as well, it looks like the show will have something for everyone. And don't forget Sony is holding a three-hour press conference. EA and Microsoft also plan to make announcements at the show.

A post by Sam Van Tilburgh on the Fable II development blog this morning reveals that Fable II avatar clothes are coming soon to an Xbox 360 near you. A package of Fable II clothing will be made available for purchase later this month, featuring various articles of game-related clothing you can purchase for "a few Microsoft points." You can actually see a bit more of the Fable II gear in our post on Xbox 360 clothes and toys from last month.

A lot of people have been asking us in recent months about Fable II clothes for their Xbox360 avatar. Well, you'll be happy to learn that we've got something coming your way! It's not going to be a single shirt but a whole package of clothing! It will be available for a few Microsoft points from Marketplace at some stage this month... We've got one teaser image showing you a shirt, but there are boots, shirts and hats! No underwear though...

That's okay Sam, we don't wear underwear anyway.

Fable II Avatar Clothes are coming! [Fable 2 Development Blog]

Weaver will be offering her line reading expertise to James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, which is slated to hit the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, PC, PSP and Nintendo DS later this year. Other famous people who will add vocal talent to Avatar include Michelle Rodriguez, Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang.

Our Comic-Con covering compatriots at io9 got a peek at 25 minutes worth of James Cameron's Avatar, which should probably get you pumped to slap on some 3D glasses. Maybe not as much as an announcement that Weaver's pipes will be pumping through your speakers this Holiday, but exciting nonetheless!

Developer NinjaBee delivered one of the earliest avatar-supporting Xbox Live Arcade titles in A Kingdom for Keflings, and now they're putting your digital representation in the line of fire in Band of Bugs. Starting July 8th players will have the ability to replace the single-player story mode's main character with themselves, gaining Maal's powers and abilities in the process. Instead of fighting for the pride of your colony, you'll instead by the great human liberator, making the garden safe for innocent bugs everywhere.

Players can also bring their avatar online in the eight-player Spider Hunter mode, fighting with or against other avatars in order to survive waves of insect attackers.

Along with the free avatar support patch comes the Tales of Kaloki DLC. Based on NinjaBee's first Xbox Live Arcade game, Outpost Kaloki, Tales takes the strategy game play from Band of Bugs and moves it into space, replacing bugs with spaceships and magical powers with lasers and rocket launchers.

"We're giving you an entirely new game," said Steve Taylor, president of NinjaBee. "The Tales of Kaloki DLC is Band of Bugs but with long-range combat using lasers, rocket launchers, OO rays and a ton of other sweet weapons to blow attacking space ships to smithereens. It's all the wackiness from Outpost Kaloki X and tactics from Band of Bugs rolled into one, and we're stoked to be releasing it."

A brand new game within a game, and only priced at 240 Microsoft points. It's heartwarming to see a downloadable title released more than two years ago see this level of continuing support, isn't it?