A new edition of City Life is set to be released in Europe this weekend.  It is City Life 2008 (CL2008), and it is the second in the City Life series from Monte Cristo Games of Paris, France.  Jirnsum of SIMphoni found several retailers preparing to sell CL2008 beginning November 23, but SIMphoni has been unable as yet to determine a planned date for release in North America. 

Description of the Game

In City Life 2008 Edition, the focus is on social engineering.  This is a unique approach to city building games.  In other games, civil unrest and violence occur in the forms of crime, riots, or public-worker strikes.  In all cases, the people are unhappy with the government.  CL2008, in contrast, addresses the issues of managing groups of people living in the same city, who don’t like one another. 

There are six subcultures, each with its own job market, and lifestyle.  The six compete with one another in a single housing market.  Generally, the subcultures live each in their own neighborhoods, due to proximity to their jobs and the types of leisure activities and support services they prefer, or can afford.  Support services include police and fire protection, medical/healthcare, shopping, and recreational/leisure activities.  Generally, as one subculture moves into a neighborhood, another is driven out, orif not, conflicts can result.

The most basic group is the Have-Nots.  The Have-Nots are uneducated, live in shanties, and have low-paying, menial jobs or none at all.  Their recreational and shopping needs are very basic: a grocery store for the essentials, and an inner-city basketball court, for example.  They have neither the time nor the resources to spend worrying about self-fulfillment.

When residents move above Have-Not status into the working class, they divide into two groups, the Blue Collars and the Fringe.  Those of us like myself who are politically-minded cannot avoid the analogy of right wing/left wing, conservative/liberal.  Blue Collar workers like sports and basic goods.  Fringe workers have a more progressive leaning, tending toward art, fashion and cuisine.  As they become more highly educated and affluent, Blue Collars move into management jobs – the “Suits” subculture, and The Fringe become snobbish artists and cultural aristocrats, known as Radical Chic.  At the highest level of social attainment, the Elite, the two groups reunite.  Liberal and conservative Elites have more in common with one another than with the poor and working classes. 

Each subculture lives peacefully with two others, keeps its distance from yet two others, and vehemently dislikes one of the other groups.  The Have-Nots hate the Elite, and vice versa.  The Radical Chic and Blue Collar can’t get along; neither can the Suits and Fringe.  But Have-Nots live in peace with Blue Collars and Fringe, Blue Collars are perfectly fine with the Have-Nots and Suits, the Suits get along with Blue Collars and Elites, etc.  The trick is to design a working city in which neighborhoods do not combine incompatible groups.  Put Fringe and Blue Collar workers in the same neighborhood, and there will be tension.  If Fringe workers and Suits share a neighborhood, you’ve got a riot on your hand.  It may seem easy at first to separate the groups, but as in any real-life city, people are inevitably going to interact.  For example, Radical Chic neighborhoods need police protection, same as anyone, but being a Police Officer is a blue-collar job.  Suits need their children to be educated, but teachers are Fringe workers.

As a player, you lay out - “zone” - residential neighborhoods. Then, you influence, but do not directly control, who moves in by placing buildings containing jobs and support services to attract the subcultures you desire.  You need all types of subcultures in a healthy city.  At first, of course, you’ll only have the working classes and Have-Nots available.  The upper classes and Elites develop with your city’s economy.  Really designing the city comes in the later stages, when transportation networks become congested.

Graphics

With most games, graphics look great when zoomed out, but deteriorate at closer zoom levels.  But in CL2008, the closer you look, the better the game looks.  The camera has a free-ranging “feel”, but is not really free.  You can rotate the view continuously through 360º, but the vertical angle is fixed, based upon the camera’s altitude.  The closer you zoom, the gentler the angle of view until, at ground level, you’re in first person mode, walking around on the ground. First person mode is where this game really becomes beautiful.  I spent a lot of non-productive time just walking around on my city’s streets, enjoying the full-3D feel.  The feeling of “being there” is captured in a lot of little animations.  Branches on the trees sway in the breeze, and the water surfaces ripple realistically.  The natural world looks better than the man-made one, but some of the buildings have a wonderful, majestic appearance as you stand on the street corner looking up at them.  Residents and workers walk along the sidewalks, representative of the local subcultures, and cars drive along the streets.  In Have-Not neighborhoods, the cars will be rusted-out beaters.  Though the game is not released in the USA yet, I could not help noticing conspicuous American visual references:  Mailboxes on the sidewalk have “U.S. Mail” stenciled on their sides; San Francisco newspapers are sold in sidewalk vending boxes, the vintage Beetle has Florida dealer plates, and the psychedelic microbus is from New York.  (See the screenshots below)

Some of the buildings are stunningly beautiful in the game’s graphics, as I mentioned, but many of these are unlocked as the city’s economy progresses. Predictably, the first buildings you’ll see early in a game are boring and unimpressive.  Earning the cool buildings is part of the appeal of the game.

Technical Matters

My install keeps an annoying green or yellow highlight to all the roads and some of the buildings (see the screenshots) that I am unable to turn off.  I know that other screenshots I have seen in other places do not have these, and show the streets in their normal colors.  The color of the sidewalks is an indicator of the subculture in the neighborhood.  The highlight is supposed to be an indicator of a road’s or a building’s effective range, and should disappear when no road or building is selected; however, on my computer, it does not.  I have no idea why this is; maybe I have missed something, but the game’s manual does not deal with the matter, and I am unable to find a setting that changes it.  I believe that without the highlight, the game would look far better than I am seeing so far.

Other than that, the game runs great.  There were zero installation hassles; I simply inserted the DVD, clicked the Install button, and walked away to talk on the phone.  When I returned, the game was successfully installed.  It also behaves very nicely alongside lots of other programs, though it runs in full-screen mode, not windowed. This is good news for those like myself who multitask.  I have been running Outlook, a photo editor program, no less than 5 web browser windows, two IM clients, an ftp application, budget management software, and City Life 2008 all day long without any problems switching among the applications.

Overall

It is a fun game, and I will play it a lot more.   I will probably even start a city journal here at Simphoni to share my city’s progress and its trials.  It is not so much about building a city, but about managing the coexistence of subcultures.  Electricity and waste are minor considerations.  You zone residences and plop buildings, and if you don’t lay out a road network in advance, the game takes care of the roads automatically.  Monte Cristo is leaving the true city-building genre to its much-anticipated game, working-titled Cities Unlimited, expected some time next year. 

 Screenshots

Each of the screenshots below is clickable to reveal the full-sized version.

Rex Stanfield, “Rexer”

Simphoni