Suppose you wanted to make a video game. You have this great idea set in a maze-world featuring a yellow disc that floats along eating dots and getting chased by four cute – but lethal – multicolored ghosts.
At some point, someone would pull you aside and gently point out that we already have “Pac-Man.”
Funny, but no one seems to have clued in the team responsible for “City Life” that we’ve had “Sim City” for more than 15 years. And that’s a good thing. Sometimes you can improve on a classic.
As one of the best-selling games of all time, “Sim City” proved that people find it terribly amusing to run a city. Zoning neighborhoods, managing traffic and tweaking tax rates turns out to provide much more pleasure than our politicians and civil servants ever let on.
Through the years, “Sim City” grew in complexity, adding better graphics and new ways to build up your town. But players could never get away from the basic feeling of constructing a homogenous, modern American grid city. Every city you build in Sim City seems like another Phoenix or suburban Chicago.
Leave it to a group of French developers to reinvent the city-building genre with a few international flourishes – like streets that run on angles and tension between social classes.
As trivial as it might sound, virtual urban designers will get a real thrill out of slicing a road diagonally across a repetitive city grid. After years of faking it, you can finally slash a Broadway through your digital New York City.
Modeling social interaction, on the other hand, probably sounds a bit odd to the American urbanite. With a legacy of a spacious frontier and wide-
open spaces, U.S. citizens have a history of settling cultural differences simply by moving.
Europeans seem a little more in touch with the idea that if you stick the haves and the have-nots on the same block, someone’s gonna get smacked.
So “City Life” provides six social classes – including the suits, the radical chic, the fringe and the blue collars – and defines their relationships. The hippie fringe doesn’t mind living near the poor have-nots, but get into conflict with the Joe Sixpack crowd, and loathe the crusty business-types. Throw in a chic nightclub on a block, and the suits might just ignore it, but the factory workers across the street will seethe at all the designer clothes invading their turf.
Pushing the social realism, “City Life” also lets the player get out of the clouds and onto the street. For the first time in a major city-simulator game, desktop urban designers can jump into their creations, viewing the city from the street.
Watching people stroll the neighborhoods you’ve designed provides this game’s biggest reward, just basking in a little city living.
“City Life”
VIDEO GAME|For PC|$39.99|Rated E for Everyone
THIS WEEK | New releases
Madden NFL 07, X360/PS2/Xbox/ GCN/PC, Electronic Arts, released Aug. 22; Madden NFL 07: Hall of Fame Edition, PS2/X360, Electronic Arts, Aug. 22; Sword of the Stars, PC, Destineer, Aug. 22; NeverEnd, PC, Dusk2Dawn Interactive, Aug. 23; One Piece: Grand Adventure, GCN/PS2, Namco Bandai Group, Aug. 22; Texas Hold ’em, X360, TikGames, Aug. 23; King of Fighters 2006, PS2, SNK Playmore, Aug. 22; Tenchu: Dark Secret, DS, Nintendo, Aug. 21; Pac-Man World Rally, GCN/PS2/PSP/PC, Namco, Aug. 22; First Battalion, PC, DreamCatcher Interactive, Aug. 21; Fuel, Xbox, DreamCatcher Interactive, Aug. 21; NeverEnd, Xbox, Dusk2Dawn Interactive, Aug. 23; UFO: Extraterrestrials and the Esperanza Imperative, PC, Tri Synergy, Aug. 21|Source: Gamermetrics.com
