I saw AVATAR on Sat­ur­day and I’m still impressed. James Cameron once again employs state-​​of-​​the-​​art tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate some­thing we’ve never seen before. Of course, with the largest bud­get a writer-​​director has ever had at his dis­posal, one would expect lots of things to be done right. Unfor­tu­nately, the movie matches awe­some spe­cial effects with a lousy script. To be hon­est, that’s some­thing Hol­ly­wood has been doing for a long time now.

AVATAR is visu­ally stun­ning and very pleas­ing to watch. The story takes place on a dis­tant planet called Pan­dora which looks like a jungle-​​covered par­adise. It’s forests are filled with fan­tas­tic crea­tures and intrigu­ing plants. Vibrant col­ors dom­i­nate the jun­gle, even at night. Pandora’s pre­dom­i­nant species is an intel­li­gent life form who call them­selves the Na’vi. Due to the low grav­ity the blue-​​skinned humanoids grow enor­mously huge: they’re roughly 11.5 feet tall. The Na’vi’s move­ments are fluid and their eyes can con­vey cred­i­ble emo­tion. Well done!

While the film is great to look at, the story dis­ap­points. This is even more true because of the stark con­trast between the mas­ter­fully real­ized CGI effects and a lousy plot that goes like this: The Na’vi hap­pily live in their Eden until some nasty humans arrive to mine a min­eral known as unob­tainium. The min­ing cor­po­ra­tion comes pro­tected by space marines and, of course, they need to get the Na’vi moved because under the tree this spe­cific tribe lives in there is the biggest unob­tainium resource within the area. At least, humans can’t breathe in the atmos­phere with­out a breath­ing appa­ra­tus. Read more…

Last week I was on sick leave and I spent quite a few hours play­ing the lat­est install­ment of the Call of Duty fran­chise: Mod­ern War­fare 2. It’s the first title of the fran­chise that I own and inter­est­ingly enough, I bought it for the PlaySta­tion 3 rather than for the PC. Any­way, I love the sin­gle player mode even if it is annoy­ingly short. An expe­ri­enced player will defeat the game in only a few hours. Apart from the length, CoD: MW2 really does fine.

It’s the multi-​​player mode that tends to suck from time to time. The devel­op­ers – the guys from Infin­ity Ward – imple­mented a fea­ture called host migra­tion. This fea­tures pre­vents the game from end­ing if a match host leaves the game early. Instead, a host migra­tion delay allows a new host to be selected and the game to con­tinue on. Out of 50 times it worked three times for me. To be hon­est, it worked more often but in these instances the game became unplayable because of the sud­den lags and stut­ter­ing. All these count­less times when I saw

In addi­tion, the game has some seri­ous bal­anc­ing issues. Every time I’m on a team with two or three other peo­ple and we’re play­ing against a team con­sist­ing of eight play­ers, I’d like to stran­gle the devel­op­ers respon­si­ble for this screw-​​up. There’s no fun in that, espe­cially if you’d pre­fer Mouse and Key­board to a Gamepad any­way. So, you’re not the best player, you’re low-​​level, and your team mates are roughly your equal and you’re play­ing against eight high-​​level char­ac­ters who have access to bet­ter weapons and perks. That sucks.

Last but not least, have you ever seen the “Game lobby closed” error mes­sage? No? You’re one of the luck­i­est guys to ever play this game. The sys­tem looks for other player, waits for more peo­ple, joins another lobby, spends more time wait­ing, pre­tends to launch the game – and then it screws you over by dis­play­ing a notice with the infor­ma­tive text “Game lobby closed”. There are times where I def­i­nitely spend more time wait­ing for a game to be set up rather than play­ing it.

I seri­ously hope they fix these issues very soon. Nonethe­less, I have to applaud them for their update strat­egy. They have a very small foot­print of only a few megabytes and they down­load quite fast. Keep up the good work and fix these issues!

Looks like Ubisoft has announced a new sequel to the Prince of Per­sia fran­chise. Prince of Per­sia: The For­got­ten Sands will con­tinue the Sands of Time tril­ogy. No words yet on how they will return to the Sands of Time sto­ry­line. Accord­ing to the press release, the game will fea­ture “many of the fan-​​favorite ele­ments of the orig­i­nal series as well as new game­play inno­va­tions”. The game’s debut trailer will pre­miere on Spike TV’s Video Game Awards 2009 on Sat­ur­day, Decem­ber 12th, 2009 at 8 p. m. EST.

The For­got­ten Sands is sched­uled for release on “con­soles and hand­helds” in May 2010. This date nicely coin­cides with the film Prince of Per­sia: The Sands of Time which will hit the movie the­aters on May 28th, 2010. I won­der whether The For­got­ten Sands will be some kind of tie-​​in to the movie? It could also sim­ply con­tinue with the prince we know – effec­tively cre­at­ing a tetral­ogy – or mark the begin­nings of a new tril­ogy. I guess we’ll have to wait until Saturday.