MONTREAL — Canadian director James Cameron might have Oscar's golden touch at the box office, but when it comes to video games he appears to have lead fingers.

His movie "Avatar" is the highest-grossing film of all time and could take home up to nine Academy Awards, including best picture, on Sunday night.

But his two-year project to produce a video-game version of "Avatar"? He's lucky they don't hand out Razzies for games.

Ubisoft, a game-maker with operations in Montreal, says Cameron saw the project as an extension of his film and worked closely on it to create new scenarios not used in the movie.

Despite those efforts, the father of box-office blockbusters like "Titanic" and "The Terminator" has helped produce the video-game equivalent of "Ishtar" -- a memorable flop.

Current sales of Avatar, the game, stand at 2.5 million copies, according to Xboxygen, an online magazine. This falls far short of Ubisoft's initial goal of five million.

Ubisoft has specifically cited Avatar as a reason its 2009-10 fiscal targets are being revised downward, and says the company is going to reduce its involvement with movie tie-ins.

"I don't know if it was because maybe James Cameron and his team did not know a lot about video games, or they just didn't have a good idea," said Erik Leijon, a video-game critic at the Montreal Mirror newspaper.

While Avatar, the video game, used successful innovations from other role-playing games, such as stronger weapons and magical powers, hardcore gamers expected more.

"Although visually impressive the game just didn't have any interesting new ideas for gamers," Leijon said.

One expert gamer agreed.

"It's a generic game with a few things tacked on that are not very well done," said David Pittaro, a professional video-game tester.

Like the movie, the game uses 3-D technology.

While that technical tour de force was a hit on the big screen, it did not translate to two-dimensional TVs, the kind most consumers own.

As a result, the same images repeat themselves and the experience becomes boring to video-game enthusiasts who like to play a game for hours, according to Leijon.

It also suffered from its appeal to a middle-of-the-road audience.

"I would think 80 per cent of the people I saw buying it 1/8Avatar the game 3/8 were moms," according to Ghalem Namiche, who manages EB Games, a Montreal video-game store.

In the world of gaming enthusiasts, that's not a good thing.

"Gamers knows those products are there to market the movie," Namiche added.