An Ode To “Miami Nights!”

Paying tribute to the sluttiest DS game EVER!

By: Toxicka Shock

ToxickaShock@gmail.com

On Twitter: @ToxickaShock

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By any honest measure, “Miami Nights: Singles In The City” is a pretty obscure and inconsequential game. Released by Ubisoft in 2008, the title barely made a dent on the Nintendo DS, which — arguably — was riding high at its software library peak.

It’s easy to see how the game fell through the cracks at the time. But in hindsight, it represents a unique cross-pollination of three largely neglected subgenres — especially for a handheld console whose target demographic were middle schoolers.

At once, “Miami Nights” is a “girl game,” a dating sim and a socialization-based RPG a’la The Sims. Like so many Barbie games, a huge component of the game involves playing around with fashion and makeup. But like The Urbz, it also gives you a surprisingly large virtual city to explore. And alike titles like Sprung, the crux of the gameplay revolves around hooking up with romantic suitors and slowly seducing them into your clutches.

Taken as a whole, “Miami Nights” is actually pretty ambitious. And if you’ve never played it before — or haven’t played it since you were a young ‘un — I think you might be VERY surprised by its risqué content.

Look, there’s no genteel way to put it — this game is SLUTTY. This isn’t just a game that encourages players to act like total ho bags, it’s a game that rewards promiscuity. The message conveyed by “Miami Nights” is pretty much the exact opposite of everything you learned in sex ed — if you want to be popular, wealthy and influential, you have to swap spit and sperm with a LOT of people. 

For a game that came out in 2008, “Miami Nights” is a shockingly sex-positive experience — albeit, one that isn’t without a few moments that’ll have you going WTF. Without getting too ahead of ourselves here, please note that one of the very first “missions” of the game has you procuring “vitamins” from a shady salon owner so you can more easily lure a would-be romantic conquest.

Or, to put it in blunter terms: the game gives you the option to DRUG YOUR DATES … in a release that was deemed perfectly acceptable for teenage players!

There is a lot to discuss here, so I’ll try to start you off with the most basic of basics.

Like most games of its ilk, you start of creating your avatar. If you’ve played The Sims, you know what to expect here. You can create either a cismale or cisfemale character, and the customization options are a little bit more robust than you might expect. Naturally, I decided to create my own virtual doppelgänger — you know, if I was made out of, like, pixels and shit.

Your personality is pretty much a blank slate at the very beginning of the game. You start off residing in a reasonably sized apartment, complete with a landlord breathing down your neck to get his rent money. Your best pal gives you a very rudimentary rundown of the core gameplay mechanics, which, in short order, sees your avatar traveling to a mall to make some quick moolah. 

From the outset, the social interaction mechanics are a bit deeper than you would assume. There are branching dialogues options to flirt, flatter, joke and discuss a wide spectrum of topics, running the gamut from supermodels to corrupt politicians to senior citizen health care reform (no, really.) There are also options to punch and steal from motherfuckers (which, surprisingly, doesn’t automatically land you in the pokey) as well as a ton of gifting commands. So basically, the idea is to figure out what kind of interests/hobbies the other characters have and contour your own personality to align with theirs. Yeah, I know, it’s probably not the best message to send to adolescents, but neither is eating wild mushrooms and jumping on the backs of fuckin’ turtles.

The “flirt” options are especially significant, because the people who made this game don’t even ATTEMPT to be subtle. For one thing, this might very well be the first (or only) video game ever made with a dedicated FRENCH KISSING button — which, as a heads up, makes both your stamina and hygiene levels go down. And, of course, there’s the take back to your place command, which is the world’s least tactful euphemism for fuck my brains out right now, please. 

As for the general layout of the game, well, it’s a lot like Grand Theft Auto in the sense that you’re free to dick around and do whatever you want, but if you want to advance the story you have to complete a bunch of very specific tasks. So in essence, “Miami Nights” is pretty much a glorified collection of mini-games and fetch quests — which, in the grand scheme of things, really isn’t that bad at all.

Now, since this is a DS game and all, pretty much all of the mini-games incorporate the touchscreen to some capacity. For example, if you want to amp up your sex appeal attribute, there’s a mini-game where you use the stylus to apply lipstick and blush. Almost all of the odd jobs you can pursue in the game follow a similar pattern — i.e., there’s a DJ mini game that plays a lot like “Simon Says,” a hostess mini-game where you have to match plates of food together, so on and so forth. Of course, if you want to make a quick buck, you can always go the salon and talk to the owner, who pays you a cool $500 to  just sit there in a jacuzzi for a couple of hours. And if you’re really in dire financial straits, you can always root around in trash cans in search of some spare change (albeit, at the expense of your cleanliness meter, obviously.)

Maxing out your stats in “Miami Nights” largely requires you to just hit a single button and wait a few seconds. If you want to increase your intellect, for example, you can read books at the library and if you want to improve your physique, you can go swimming. And you’re always free to go shopping (either at the mall or online) to pick up some new clothes or furniture. Really, there’s a lot more to do within the game world than I anticipated — GTA V, it may not be, but they at least TRIED to give you a fair number of distractions to tinker around with.

Admittedly, the game does become a bit too linear at times. To progress in what passes for Miami Nights’ storyline, you pretty much have to do exactly what the game tells you. After a while, it becomes easier to just tap the map icon and teleport from event to event, until you inevitably run out of funds and have to start spamming the jacuzzi mini-game again. This is easily the worst thing about Miami Nights — at certain junctures, it LITERALLY becomes a chore to sit through.

That said, the socialization elements of the gameplay — however limited — keep you strangely invested in the experience. One minute, you’re drinking a rock and roll drummer under the table (literally) and the next you’re flirting with some scummy television producer on a yacht so he’ll give you prominent placement in a commercial (which, in turn, nets your avatar $20,000 and lecherous advances from your old landlord, who has no probably letting you stay at his place “for free” now that you’ve find niche celebre.)

Yes, in hindsight, a lot of this stuff is … discomfiting. Despite its T-rating, one has to assume that the actual player base for the game skewed even younger, and if middle schoolers are basing their expectations of adult sexuality on this game, holy shit, are they in trouble. Certainly a product of its time, Miami Nights seems to posit the ultra-materialistic, ultra-hedonistic excesses of the Paris Hilton/Lindsey Lohan era not just as an aspirational model, but the default mode for actual 20-something living. It’s a grimly unrealistic depiction, for sure, with more than a few undertones that give pause to even a major ho bag like myself. Still, if I had to go with a video game that was over-sexualized to the point that it almost becomes a parody of “hook-up culture” or one that treated promiscuity as a cardinal sin — in the process, reaffirming all the usual anti-woman and anti-gay convictions that are inherent to the “slut-shaming” pastime — you know which one I’m vouching for.

The openness with which Miami Nights addresses homosexuality/bisexuality really surprised me, though. Even now it’s kinda’ unusual to find a video game produced by a major publisher that takes such a relaxed attitude towards non-straightness. Same-sex and multi-sex attraction in Miami Nights isn’t frowned upon or treated like some gimmick; rather, it almost seems to encourage the player to expand his or her sexual horizons … virtually speaking, of course. And how comforting and refreshing it is to encounter a game that distances itself from the rampant homophobia/biphobia of the late 2000s pop-over culture. Perhaps if this game came out five years later, it would’ve given us one of the first tasteful depictions of transgenderism in the annals of video gaming.

As for my own playthrough of Miami Nights, I was both impressed and underwhelmed by the holistic experience. The game itself isn’t terribly long, and towards the end there’s way too much grinding going on — to the point that you’ll have to spend an hour or so spamming odd jobs just to have enough cash on hand to advance the “primary” story. Along the way, you’ll have to max out your stats in certain categories to even be eligible for the next story-advancing rendezvous, so that means you’ll likely find yourself hitting the mall or random night clubs and talking to total strangers just so you can increase your humor and charisma levels. It can get repetitive and a little irritating, especially when there aren’t that many truly amusing extracurricular activities to participate in. Eventually, you’ll hit status as a “jet setter,” at which point the game stops giving you “missions” altogether and you have free rein to just wander around the game space doing what the hell ever. You’ve got a lot of attractions in a nominal sense — aquariums and carnivals and libraries and museums, among other sites — but most of that just involves hitting the A button, watching the virtual time burn off the clock and subsequently seeing certain stats lines go up or down. Needless to say, Miami Nights could’ve benefitted from a lot more mini-games — or, at the very least, more interactions with NPCs that didn’t simply boil down to picking two or three options out of already limited dialogue trees.

Still, there’s so much subversive stuff going on in the game that it’s impossible to hate it, even when it forces you to do the same tasks over and over again. In a nod to the Grand Theft Auto games, one of your metrics just so happens to be “criminality,” which you can boost by engaging in fist fights, pick pocketing and stealing other people’s mail (conversely, you can lower your criminality by going to the police station and paying off fines.) And it’s quite evident that the developers of the game had a peculiar sense of morality here, since certain traits — i.e., sexiness and humor — totally outweighs values like kindness and intellect. I suppose the takeaway there is that as long as you’re a hot, funny slut with good communication skills, you can rule the fuckin’ world. I mean, not that it’s a wholly unrealistic perspective, especially from an epoch that gave us cultural role models a’la Anna Nicole Smith and Amy Winehouse.

As stated earlier, you can also choose to play the game as a cisgender male, which follows more or less the same shtick as the cisgender female storyline, albeit with a couple of obvious tweaks — for example, your wingman is replaced by a wingwoman and instead of the makeup application mini-game, there’s a shaving mini-game. Otherwise, the male and female experience in Miami Nights is virtually identical … either way, you end the game living on a humongous yacht, complete with what appears to be copious piles of blow and prescription pill bottles strewn all over your coffee tables. 

Of course, Miami Nights isn’t a truly great game — that shit should be obvious to everybody. But it is an intriguing little relic from a point in time with some very interesting/concerning aesthetics and social mores and it’s hard to pinpoint any other DS game that’s willing to push materials so ribald and wildly age-inappropriate. I mean, shit — you didn’t see Princess Peach trying to seduce her landlord to get outta’ paying rent, or Kirby trying to fuck his way up the social ladder, did you?

XOXO, TOXICKA