Simcity 6

One thing I’m greatly anticipating in the coming days is the very near release of Cities XL by Monte Cristo.

I’m a hopeless Simcity fanatic, so after Electronic Arts took the Simcity franchise away from Maxis and delivered the utterly mindless droth that was Simcity Societies, I’ve been looking elsewhere for a fix to fix my city sim fixation. It looks like myself and many others alike may well have found it in Cities XL.

It's simcity 6 time in the neighbourhood.At this point, anything’s got to be better than Simcity. After Simcity 4 (which is still a fantastic game thanks to the modding community,) EA’s notorious reign of mediocre gaming took hold and quashed all life out of the quirky city builder franchise. The indie developers have been nipping at the sim-pie forever now, and Cities XL is the nth iteration of the Monte Cristo City Life game, which to the best of my knowledge started development about a year before Simcity Societies itself.

Multi-player support is the really killer feature in the re-jigged XL. You’ll get to build in a massive multiplayer world, where you can trade and take part in a time vortex of all kinds of sim-awesome. This is subscription based and though I’m apprehensive, it seems quite reasonably priced.

Top down view rocks Ashley's city blocks. Oh, the lameness!You can pre-order until the game is released which will give you all manner of benefits, and there’s also a digital download available at a reduced price. This means that unless you’re the type of old fuddy duddy who collects computer game boxes (and let’s face it — I have — boxes of digits are worth almost nothing,) you can give your money directly to the developer and download the two gigabytes or so of game for USD $39.99.

Blue sky in a city sim is an oft-desired trait.After a bunch of deliberation yesterday I set aside my need to eat, and pre-ordered the game. I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be awesome, but I’ve had bad experiences pre-ordering games. (Simcity 4 brought me to tears when it was first released because it was almost unplayable.)

Cities XL is nevertheless hotly anticipated for release tomorrow, and I think at this point it’s more than deserving of the colloquial title, Simcity 6.

You may also be interested in my follow-up article Cities XL Goes Dark.

The text of this post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.

  1. Posted October 6, 2009

4 Comments

  1. Owen

    October 7, 2009 10:11

    I have always liked Sim City-esque games, but the reward you receive for doing well has never really been enough. I might have to look into this game, as it’s quite cheap, and anything I can do to say “fuck you” to EA is a good thing.

  2. Paul

    October 30, 2009 11:13

    I hate SimCity Societies. Its a memory hogging commercial for British Petroleum. Its so aweful. Is this Cities XL really good?

  3. Ash

    October 31, 2009 18:56

    Cities XL has definitely gone in a different direction to what Societies did, I think for the better. You can’t really compare it to Simcity 4, but with the MMO aspect it has the potential to be even better.

    We’ll have to wait and see, but definitely grab a copy if you can. :)

  4. Me

    January 5, 2010 6:01

    I hate simcity societies, I love simcity 4 :) but it broken for I don’t know what reason, I bought City Life it was good but when you are going better in this game there is no more challenge so I hope that Maxis would make a game like Simcity 4 but with some ameliorations that can comes from city life (I love the roads system in city life :) but we need more then these roads to make a good city).

    Anyway hope that they will make a game like that ’cause I will go buy it right away.