Avatar: Legends of the Arena (Windows, Mac)

AVATAR: LEGENDS OF THE ARENA is an online multiplayer game that's a spinoff of Nickelodeon's Asian-influenced cartoon, Avatar The Last Airbender. While the cable series features Aang and his pals as they fight to save the world from the evil Fire Nation, this game is primarily about fighting others online in an arena and leveling up your character by winning fights and by training in single player mode. Gone are the complexities and minutia of the series, including the fact that Aang lives in a 12 year old's body even though he's a 112-year-old who's been in suspended animation.

You play the game by using your keyboard buttons and your mouse. After downloading and installing a 45 meg file, you'll create a character using a limited amount of options for hairstyles, clothing and the like. You choose which kind of fighter you wish to be: one who uses water, air, fire or earth. You'll be able to level up as you train and earn gold through playing online to use to purchase equipment and powers in a shop. Once you go online and find four people to play with (it's a long wait right now), the fighting is fast and furious, full of colorful, fireworks-like magic used to kill your opponent. Online play is a little sluggish but the graphics are quite detailed. Unfortunately, you'll even have to wait a good while for the single player, offline mode to load.

There certainly have been some misconceptions about this game. It's not an MMO; it's a four-person multiplayer game. At time of launch, there still were problems with getting online and playing: you may just wait and wait and nothing will happen. There are no parental controls regarding limiting the length of time you can play. Nor are the matches ranked by level; a newbie can easily be killed by an old hand at the game, some of whom have millions of leveling up points. Plus, in Avatar forums, you'll see snide posts from adults waiting to defeat newbie eight year olds. Thankfully, there's no chat function to allow these older folks to browbeat kids, or worse.

You can see that there's potential in the game, but it's not there yet. Leveling up and buying new powerups with your gold looks like fun. And the fighting, when it's not slow, looks like something you'll want to play over and over again. Still, there's no way to minimize the game aside from closing it all together. Worse, there's no way to call up the instructions during play or to print them. They're fairly complex. You're supposed to be able to find super rare, super powerful powerups called Relics. But the instructions don't indicated how. Ultimately, the game has a lot of problems that need to be worked out.

Available on: Windows, Mac
Available online
Genre: Fighting
Developer: Nickelodeon
Released on: September 19, 2008
Price: Free
ESRB Rating: NR