After the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, many wondered how long it would take before life could get back to normal. How long would it be before we started watching the same movies? Listening to the same music? Playing the same games? How long would it be before we got back to our commercial existence of exploiting everything we can find? Apparently the official length of time was five years.

This year American movie-goers were given a choice between two different 9/11 motion pictures. Last spring saw the release of United 93, the biopic of the plane that didn't hit the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. The other choice comes in the way of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, an emotional look at the firefighters who were on call when the towers were struck.

While United 93 was low-key and respectful, World Trade Center has taken a much different approach to their marketing. They are selling shirts, arm bands, soundtracks and other paraphernalia to support the movie. They even took the time to create a MySpace account for the film (quick, they are excepting friend invites). After five long years of grief it's clear that our nation's suffering is over. Finally we can go back to exploiting anything and everything in the hopes of making money.

Perhaps that's why this World Trade Center PlayStation 2 game isn't much of a shock. With so many other World Trade Center products hitting the shelves it was only a matter of time before Paramount decided to find a third party developer willing to make the game. Little is known about this World Trade Center video game, but already the 9/11 Widows have taken sides condemning this kind of exploitation. In game stores all around the country we are starting to hear yells of "too soon!"

Of course, this is not the first time Oliver Stone has been in hot water over a video game. In the 1990s Stone optioned the movie Natural Born Killers for a video game, but after spending years in development hell the publishers quietly killed the project. In the wake of the controversy over Night Trap and Mortal Kombat the entire industry was afraid of drawing the fire from the government, so ultra-violent games like Natural Born Killers were buried and eventually abandoned.

There is no date set for the World Trade Center video game, but THQ announced that it would be available for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PlayStation Portable (PSP). When we have pictures and video of World Trade Center we will make sure and pass them along to you. We can only hope that World Trade Center works out better than that Alexander PC game.