Miami News Blog

Showtime, Marc Ecko Entertainment, and Icarus Entertainment are bringing a Dexter videogame to the iPhone. Which means hot, 3-D Miami-murder action. From the looks of the Dexter game trailer, GTA: Vice City might be a more accurate graphical representation of the Magic City, but nonetheless, here's the extended trailer straight out of Comic-Con.

Yesterday, Square Enix launched a countdown site with a very familiar clock chime, not to mention the site name ctds (Chrono Trigger DS). Today, they announced that the famed game will be coming to the Nintendo DS.

Square has a bad habit of porting their old games to new consoles, but this is one I’m willing to forgive. I mean it’s Chrono Trigger, one of the greatest RPGs of all time in my not so humble opinion. Still, isn’t it rather evil for a company to capitalize on rabid fandom, rather than give us the new installment in the series that gamers have dreamed about for ages?

- Elvis Ramirez

So by now PS3 owners are rejoicing as they crack open their Metal Gear Solid 4 cases (Smells good, doesn't it). The PS3 exclusive has been eagerly awaited by fans for more than a year, and at 12:01 am today Gamestops and Best Buys all over Miami (and the rest of the country) opened their doors and handed out copies of the game to the screams and grunts of the mostly male crowds.

I'm sure forum servers are lighting on fire as hundreds of people post their first screenshots, or comments, that's if those who preordered the game aren't glued to their TV screens. I sense that many will call in sick tomorrow.

If you wandered the streets of Hialeah on any other night you'd see restaurants with a couple of night owls sipping Cuban coffee, but tonight the same night owls were joined by gamers trying to take the edge off while they waited for the magic hour. Not even the 80 percent humidity kept them at bay.

For eons, games have been the epitome of the sit down activity, one of the center pieces in the sedentary lifestyle that many blame for the weight problems in this country. But Nintendo, ever the revolutionary, has set out to get people in to shape, and hopefully break the stigma surrounding video games, with the release of Wii Fit.

By now, the game, a term which I use very loosely, has garnered positive reviews, 80% on Gamerankings.com. I agree that Nintendo is doing a great thing here introducing innovation to an industry that has been ruled by the same tried-and-true genres for far too long, but my one qualm with Wii Fit is the way that it is being labeled a game. It is a game in concept only.

I’m not even that big a GTA fan – I’m the sort who does a few missions, loses interest, and then just drives around the city raising hell and seeing how long I can fend off the police – yet there I was last night, in line in front of a local game shop, waiting to get my hands on GTA4. I guess I just like the community aspect – lineup events remind me there’s an actual physical community out there; real people, not just semitransparent swearing poltergeists floating around on Xbox Live and PSN.

And oh what a community we are. Actually, I was surprised by how diverse the turnout was: all ages, all races, and a range of economic classes were represented – the only scarce demographic being, unsurprisingly, females. In the line of 75 or so people, I counted about 8 women – and two of those, interestingly enough, were moms there to purchase the game for their accompanying underage sons.

(By the way, that’s some fucking balls; when I was that age I didn’t even want my mom to pick me up at school. Not only were those kids able to bamboozle mommy into sitting in line with them for a couple hours on a Monday night to buy them an M-rated videogame, but they clearly didn’t give a shit if the whole rest of the line saw it.)

Violence and videogames have been together since the beginning of time (or at least since videogames evolved beyond Pong). As we move into an era where the unlikely “uncanny valley,” the idea that as video game characters become more like humans yet not completely so they actually cause revulsion in those playing the games, isn’t so farfetched, I chose to take a look back and pick five game series which took violence to unprecedented levels and then told gamers, “You better like this or we’ll kick you in the throat.” So here they are in all their gory goodness: -- Elvis Ramirez

5. Postal

Postal is one of those games with absolutely no shame. At least Mortal Kombat had a story, a thin one but one nonetheless. Postal pretty much drops a machinegun into the player’s hands and says go kill things. Uwe Boll is making a film based on the game, now that’s an act of violence against the American public.

With the way the economy is going and magazine and newspaper readership on the decline, it is understandable that the print media are scrambling to find new ways to increase revenues. But selling out to the proportion that the Official XBox Magazine has done is pretty damn ridiculous.

According to this Kotaku post, Insert Credit, a gaming website, reported on the death of print game journalism as they discovered April's issue of the magazine. An ad replaced the the magazine's cover, but the ad was tailored to look like the magazine's actual front page. This is not the same as selling ad space on the cover of your publication, this boils down to fooling people outright.

By now, you gaming faithful have already watched the Sonic Unleashed leaked video on Youtube (like most of us, you guys are probably also salivating at the idea). Here it is for you folk that haven't seen it.

The Xbox 360 had an early lead in this console war, but now, Microsoft seems to be faltering behind Sony (and not only in Japan, where the 360 doesn't stand a chance against Nintendo and Sony's vice-like grasp on the market.)

The end of HD-DVDs may very well prove to be a serious blow to the Microsoft machine if they don't decide quickly what they are going to do about losing their large-capacity format. It seems that Microsoft took their lead and started lording it over Sony, not noticing that their was a flying chair coming right for Microsoft's head.

Sony is close to delivering on the promises that they made way back when the PS3 was first released, and with the advantage of having beaten Toshiba's format, well, let's just say Microsoft's situation is looking pretty grim, like impending doom grim.

Let us not mention Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which stands to sell many Wiis (feel free to giggle at that one) if the sales in Japan and the anticipation here are any indicators, lest Microsoft gaming execs really go ballistic. --Elvis Ramirez

Who said petitions don't work? Well, they really don't. Only sales numbers can compel a company to do anything, but I still say the petition to bring over Persona 3 FES, the expansion to Persona 3, to the states in April had something to do with the Atlus' decision to cave in to fans.

Persona 3 came out in August of last year. It missed getting buried in the deluge of holiday releases by a hair. Thankfully, Atlus fans gobbled up the game like it was manna from heaven. Most other gamers ignored the game where simulated suicide was the key component to not only the storyline but also the game's mechanics.