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.
A critique for the established SimCity fan base
SimCity Societies is a fun and entertaining game, and can provide hours of computer-gaming enjoyment. Now, stop thinking of it as SimCity and that can continue to be the case. The fact is, Electronic Arts (EA) did not do this game any favors by lending the name of SimCity, one of the most successful electronic games of all time1, to it. It is the same disservice that was done to the 9142; when Porsche attached its name and prestigious chrome insignias though everyone knew it was really just a very sporty Volkswagen. Like the 914, Societies runs and handles well, does exactly as it’s told, is fun to drive, and is found lacking only when compared to its famous namesake cousins.
Dear Members of Simphoni.
Some of you may have noticed that a few hours ago, on the morning of Sunday, October 7, 2007, the entire Simphoni site went down until just now. I would like to state for the record that this was a planned and necessary site outage, which was required in order to perform maintenance on the database, and to install several terrific upgrades. I would like to say that, but it isn’t true. Instead, what really happened was that a large bull named Rexer got loose in the Simphoni China Shop. I began editing user permissions at the site, relevant to a change of personnel, within mere seconds of waking up in the morning and before downing even my first sip of coffee. Before anyone could say “reticulating splines”, I had deleted the entire Simphoni account from the server!
Looking back on it now, it’s almost funny. Almost. But that simple mistake of mine this morning came very close to spelling the end of SIMphoni as we know it. After some frantic telephone calls to our Tech Admin Sdrawkcab, and IMs with Jirnsum and Gil, I began making concrete plans to schedule plastic surgery for myself, file papers in court to change my name, and to move to a new city where I would have started a new life entirely from scratch. Fortunately, the terrific support staff at DreamHost was able to restore everything: files, software, news items, posts - everything! Thanks to sdrawkcab for quick action on this, and helping to get things set back up again.
I apologize for the site outage we experienced this morning, and pledge to leave the major technical heavy-lifting to trained, authorized personnel in the future.
Rexer
Philippe Da Silva and Dirk of Simtropolis caught up with one another to discuss the progress of Monte Cristo’s upcoming Cities Unlimited and to share a few screenshots.
Two screenshots were included which show the method players will use to select the region of the world in which to locate a new city. The two also discussed the decision to split the Cities Unlimited development into two teams at Monte Cristo, a Simulation Team and a Production Team, and the upcoming Cities Unlimited official website, which will be launched in October 2007 at www.cuplanet.com. Thanks to Philippe and Dirk for the informative interview!
At the same time, Simtropolis expanded its coverage of Cities Unlimited by opening a new Cities Unlimited forum, similar to our own CU forum here at Simphoni.
Please pardon us for the next very few hours as we move to a new host. We have disabled forum operations during the period of transition, in order to prevent losing posts that are made during this brief time. The migration will be occurring for the next three to four hours. During this time, the shoutbox at the bottom of the main index page will be active, and can be used as a backup means of communication for forum members.
The new host will allow the administrators of the site to react more rapidly to the rapid growth our site is experiencing in its membership and activity.
UPDATE:
Please be aware that after the move, it may take up to 24 hours for your ISP’s DNS server to point to the correct place for the site. If you do get an error trying to reach the site, please try hitting CTRL-F5. If that doesn’t work please try again later.
Simphoni is now accepting news and article submissions! If you’ve got a news item you think we should know about, or you would like to share your thoughts with the world, you can now submit news or an article to Simphoni.
When you submit news, Gil, our new Editor-in-Chief, will ensure that your news article is high-quality and unbiased. If it meets our standards, your article, with your name on it, will appear on our front page. If you submit a longer article, like a tutorial or commentary on a game, we’ll post it with your name on it, along with our other articles about that game, once we get the rest of our site set up.
If you’d rather not go through the trouble of writing an article, you can just send your news tip to Gil or myself and we’ll write an article about it and make sure to credit you.
And, if that weren’t enough, Gil assumes the position of Editor-in-Chief on his 20th birthday. Thanks, Gil, for helping to make SIMphoni a better site, and congratulations on your birthday!
Loading ...