Ubisoft

[Welcome to the Sci-Fi Lunch Break, where we'll be supplying you with a cool bit of audio/visual goodness to break up the monotony of the work day. You bring the turkey on rye, we'll bring you something out of this world to watch while you eat it.]

Yesterday's news that Eli Roth would be producing an alien invasion film that opened with the enigmatic reveal of a world forever changed reminded me about the trailer for Ubisoft's upcoming title I am Alive. The "first-person survival game" made its initial appearance a few years ago at E3, teasing the world with the trailer embedded below, but has been relatively hidden since then.

Ubisoft put I am Alive, which will challenge players to survive the nine-day aftermath of a massive earthquake that levels Chicago, on the release back burner to make way for Assassin's Creed 2, but now that the latter has been released (to considerable acclaim, I might add), we should expect the game sometime in 2010.

One of the first big information breaks on the secrets of James Cameron's Avatar came back in June when the director himself took the stage at E3 during Ubisoft's press conference to talk about the upcoming video game based on the film. In his now notorious talk, Cameron drained the energy out of the room by going on and on about the plot of the game, which mirrors the movie's, revealing so much information that Joystiq remarked "we no longer feel obligated to see it when it hits theaters." What they were shown of the game, however, was stunning. Ubisoft had been plugging away at it for over two years and it showed in the lush, player-interactive world of Pandora.

And now you too can get a first hand look at the Avatar game without having to hear Cameron spoil the movie. That is if you have a PC that meets the minimum system requirements which are, not unsurprisingly, quite beefy. ShackNews picked up on the PC demo for the game, which will be available in full for the 360, PS3 and Wii on December 1st, from the German Coca-Cola Zero site of all places, and now they're hosting it for nerds the world over to try out. Being a worldly nerd, I grabbed the 1.6gig demo and gave it a play through. It was fun, but more surprising was how much context it gave the images we've seen so far from the mega-budget production.