James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game (Ubisoft; DS, PC, PS3, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360; rated teen)

Not far into the video game based on James Cameron’s upcoming film, I had to choose a side.

Avatar: The Game takes place on Pandora, a beautiful but potentially deadly moon far from Earth. Humans mining Pandora’s resources have been surviving in the strange new environment with the aid of the Na’vi—the indigenous population of intelligent, bipedal, blue-skinned creatures. But the RDA, the Earth-based organization running the operation, wants more freedom to remove resources without worrying about the locals, and the Na’vi are showing signs of resistance.

Someone within the RDA was passing information to the Na’vi, and as a code breaker and one of the few humans able to have their consciousness transferred into one of the Na’vi, my character was on Pandora to help expose the spy. After about an hour of gaming, which gave me a chance to play in both human and Na’vi bodies, I had to decide whether to support the RDA or the Na’vi.

But, in the short time leading up to that decision, I was moving so quickly through the new and fantastic environment, I didn’t have the full context for the story or the critical decision I was being asked to make. It became a hollow, meaningless choice. Thankfully, the game automatically creates a save file at this point, so I was able to play different games from each side.

Avatar is really two games in one: a third-person shooter and a strategy game, called Conquest, in which the objective is to control Pandora. Experience gained playing the shooter becomes currency in Conquest, and capturing territory there gives your character bonuses in the shooter.

But despite the great graphics, the imaginative environment, and the cleverly scripted plot twists, I couldn’t escape the fact that the entire Avatar concept—in both the film and the video game—is predicated on the colonial concept of the “noble savage”. And that misguided idea that a primitive people are pure taints everything. I had a bad taste in my mouth while playing the game.