Huzzah! The Cities XL demo is here, 1gb in breadth, for you to download, play, and then weigh on the platinum scales of consumer judgment. The new city-builder with an online dimension seems like it’s been in beta for about 47 years, but it’s actually only a few weeks. Nevertheless there’s been a marked improvement since the early wobbles, and this limited demo gives you a taste of that improved game with a city restricted to 22,000 inhabitants, built in a choice of three of the twenty five landscapes across the three teeming planets of the game.
I do believe we have a Cities XL interview in the pipeline, so keep an eye out for that, should you be buildingly inclined. Full demo info here.
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@Gabanski Yes, you can build bendy roads.
@people-who-encountered-bugs The beta was riddled with bugs, so this is a shame. Makes you wonder what the beta was for, frankly. Performance was the biggest issue for me.
@Windows7-users Oddly, I had no trouble running the beta on Windows 7, bugs notwithstanding.
With regards to multiplayer interactions, it’s kind of integral, but kind of not. You can happily build a city without talking to anyone else, but unless you trade, you’re limited in what you can do. Note that you can also trade (at high cost) with the ‘bank’, so if you’re really antisocial, you can still play solo. (I think.)
Point is: don’t expect too much in the way of an MMO. After you’ve set up some trades, the MMO-ness of the game really boils down to the chat window. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not much more than that, and the avatar thing is really just an added bonus for the die-hards and/or socialisers.
Holy shit, after going through that crap to actually get the demo running, I log in and update fine, at which point the game decides it’s a good idea that as an administrator, I don’t have the required privileges to play the game.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH
I found it more than a little disappointing that they went through the trouble of making whole planets, and proceeded to make your positioning relative to other cities and on the globe itself completely irrelevant. It’s really like playing Shogun: Total War in that there are only a few maps to do your business on, despite the illusion to the contrary. Furthermore, the fact that you don’t get a clear look at all the options that might one day be available to you is nothing short of maddening. On the one hand, I’m okay with “unlocking” different types of road or building. On the other hand, it’s more than frustrating to find that the space you left for those handsome boulevards you suspected might be necessary is actually a hair’s breadth too narrow for the actual boulevard.
Also, the performance is horrendous on pretty much any level of detail you choose; my machine isn’t exactly top-of-the-line, but it’s far from low-end, and in spite of this, even on godawful mode, it chugs along painfully.
Long ago, I wanted to try something other than SimCity 4 so I picked up City Life, only to find it a buggy, disappointing mess several years after release. I fear that CitiesXL will fare no better.
After the painstakingly slow download (avg. 25kbps) I somehow managed to install it (the demodata.exe kept freezing at the exact same point every time), registered, downloaded the update, and what I get is 2 pop-up boxes telling me:
“Method verify Access failed”
“You do not have sufficient access privileges to install the game. Please contact your administrator”
Apparently the game doesn’t like Vista 32bit, I’m on the administrator account and it won’t just work.
to get past the
“Method verify Access failed”
“You do not have sufficient access privileges to install the game. Please contact your administrator”
all you have to do is change the compatability mode to Windows XP by right clicking the exe file, properties etc etc…
that worked on my Vista 64bit
@people who are getting messages about insufficient privileges in Windows Vista. There is no “Administrator” account in Windows Vista (and 7 for that matter). Even when you set yourself as an Admin you still perform most tasks as an unprivileged user. Have you tried running the game by right clicking it and choosing “Run As Administrator” ?
I’ve not played the game, so can’t say if this will fix it, but it does fix a lot of similar issues.
Still didn’t work for me, even after setting it to run in XP compatability. But I found a quite interesting .cfg file; Cities XL\data\config\demo.cfg. It seems like you could change the population limit by simply raising the number in the cfg file, someone might want to try it and see if it works.
It downloaded in 15 minutes, but I set both CitiesXL.exe and CitiesXL_Game.exe to XP compatibility mode without luck. Tried running either as Admin but same problem. On Vista 64.
Now i can see why software can have trouble running on a multitude of hardware configurations, but this is basic windows programming stuff which MUST be easily reproducable. This is plain lack of testing and programming skill. Once more i feel sorry for the artists and designers of a game who poored their hearts into making something that is then ruined by sloppy programming and bad testing.
Such a waste…
I’m also getting the
“Method verify Access failed”
“You do not have sufficient access privileges to install the game. Please contact your administrator”
rigamarole.
This is on 32-bit Vista. On a computer built yesterday. Tried the XP compatability mode, too. What a boondoggle.
Got it running with a tip found on another forum. Get this: you need to set CitiesXL.exe to XP compatability mode, and CitiesXLgame.exe to Win98 compatability mode. Then it runs.
For what that’s worth.
@UncleSmoothie
Very Very weird, but I’ll try that
@Unclesmoothie – wouldn’t right-click, run as administrator work? Failing that, a good rule with Vista is to NOT install games to program files. Instead, install them into a “games” folder off the root.
Bah screw demo hulk wants buy now!
Can’t wait till i get my dirty city buiding hands on this baby.
I spent 2 hours to download the game and somehow screwed up in character creation. Now my nickname and email account are in use, and I can’t access my account somehow.
Thanks for the tip unclesmoothie, I got the game running but the problem that I had earlier (demodata.exe stops making progress when it’s installed about 90%) is now coming back to haunt me. Tried to launch the tutorial but the game crashed. No wonder, since the demodata.exe is about a gig in size and contains pretty much everything. Going to try leaving the installer on for an hour, maybe I’m just being impatient waiting for the installation to complete.
Wish I’d read this comments thread before wasting time and bandwidth on this crap. Win 7 64bit fail.
It does say in the FAQ that the demo does not support win7 but full game will.
The whole process was awful anyway irrespective of strange incompatibilities.
Stupid thing refused to work on Vista, XP and Seven :(
No way I’m buying this. Monte Cristo fails again…
@cmaster believe it or not, I’ve done all that. I always have a separate Games\ directory off the OS partition. This game is just insidious.
Using the XP/98 comparability method I got the game running briefly before I took off for the office. It ran horribly slowly and defaulted to the low graphics setting on a quad-core with more RAM than HAL 9000. Most likely because Win 98 didn’t know what to do with all that hardware. As soon as I tried to bump up the graphics, it hung until I killed the process.
When I get home tonight: uninstall, delete, salt that part of the harddrive like the Romans did Carthage.
Christ. Either RPS readers are batshit stupid, or the Cities XL is monumental disaster.
Has anyone actually had any success with it and/or is happy with it?
I’ve not had any problems with it :)
Usually it’s only the people with issues who post: t’others will be playing.
@David
Monumental disaster seems about right to me. I’m certainly not buying a game that insists on login, connection, version checking, connection again, version checking again, creating some pointless fucking avatar and choosing a planet, just so I can be confronted by badly optimised graphics. Absolutely hateful. And of course unless I’m missing something if either your or their internet goes down, you can’t save or play.
For those getting the “Failed Access Verify Method” (that might be the wrong order of word), I found a fix by googling that error message. The fix was to find the installation folder and set CitiesXL to run in XP compatibility and CitiesXL_game to run in 98 compatibility. I was able to get it to run at that point.
The problem for me though was terrible performance. The game ran unplayably slow. One second or more delays on clicks. I even lowered all the graphics settings as low as possible. I suspect it was because I have the 64 bit driver for my video card and when I switched to 98/xp compatibility, the system defaults to the standard windows GPU driver and my video card didn’t get used.
@Jim: I know it does happen often, but I have never seen the “only people who’s game won’t work post” be this one sided since the Xbox360.
And we all know who turned out to be right about that.
Another interesting thing… Monte Cristo has released the NEW!! Cities XL website which is smoother!! and easier to navigate!!!
Not mentioned: the removal of the community forums where people were bitching about the bugs and performance issues. That’s pretty shady in my book. Unfortunately, simtropolis is websensed from work.
@FunkyLlama Regarding offline/online shenanigans, I think the game is stored offline and sync’d periodically — if your connection goes down, you might still be okay.
So I finally got it working, played it for 2 hours, and now it can’t find the cities anymore and goes back to the loading screen after trying. Oh well, I played enough to form an opinion: do want. The graphics weren’t a problem for me, ran at full settings without stuttering.
The gameplay itself is IMO better than simcity 4. It may not be as deep, but building bridges, roads, zones, the usual stuff, is just so much easier. For example bridges can have a curve in the middle, so you don’t need hills that are facing each other.
If I get it working I’ll try the config tweak which I posted about earlier, but since you have to be online all the time I reckon the servers are going to check for cities that are over the limit. After some patching this game could claim the throne of SC4.
Downloaded the demo, got it all installed. When I run it and log in, it says “checking for updates..” and then after around 30 seconds it just flashes a Download failed message.
No note of it on the site, and now that they’ve deleted their forums, no way to easily figure out how to fix it.
They don’t even offer links as to where you can download the beta and from the looks of it they can’t even handle supporting a simple patching mechanism. This doesn’t bode well :(
For me it keeps claiming I’m not connected to the internet. With no firewall or anti virus running. Tho I do have XP 64…
The beta has worked for me on Win7 64 without a hitch, so it could just be an issue with the demo.
Bah to this. On the brightside, I still have simcity4.
what bloody cd keys are you using to register????
Hi guys!
Yesterday i downloaded the cities xl demo and after unpacking it showed 2 execute files called CitiesXlDEMO (62,3Mb) and DemoData (936Mb).
I puted both running and some how the game started but i didn’t have my register done so i had to leave the game and went to cities xl site to register.
Until today i never could start the game.
I put both files running, they sort of unpack and install but nothing else occurs.
Please, what do i have to do to play this game demo?
Please, someone can help me?
I have vista 32bits laptop.
Thank you.
I still can’t get this working. I don’t know if it has anything to do with me being on North America, because I understand this was supposed to be a “European” demo, whatever that’s supposed to mean in an online game. Anyway… I’m not impressed so far. The actual game better be good.
For win7 users! Try to install it with Windows XP compatibility. It works!
so heres what i found for Windows 7 users, I got it installed, then went to the folder where its installed to and Right Clicked citiesxl.exe or whatever the exe is for it and “Run as Administrator”. i can get the game to load, takes me to the avatar creation screen.
now my issues is this, when i create it and hit Upload Avatar, it says connecting and whatnot and gives me an error. It then tries again, then says it loses it connection and just sits at the connecting screen doing nothing… if i close the game out, my network is all messed up and cant get online (IE8 or Firefox) at all and i either restart or disable/enable the network and it works agian…. any ideas?
thanks in advance to anyone who can answer. again, keep in mind, im running W7 RC.
Correction – i got it working… here are my steps for the Windows 7 users.
1.) if you have the game installed, pls UNINSTALL IT.
2.) once all the old files and whatnot are out, reinstall the demo exe file but when you do, make sure you RIGHT CLICK and run as administrator.
3.) once installed, go into the install folder and right click the CitiesXL.exe and right click “Run as administrator”
4.) the game will load and run, and let you create your avatar, then it will let you play from there.
im not sure why but i think the uninstalling and reinstall as administrator did the trick. it probably allowed an entry into the windows programs exceptions log or something. i dunno, but after that, it worked fine for me. hope this was of help for everyone.
Win7 x64 users:
It installed fine for me, there was nothing special I needed to do. However, when I tried running the demo from the start menu, I got an error (mentioned in a previous post) & also the registration page I was sent to required a cd key.
Sooo I ran CitiesXL_Game.exe from the installation folder, which did NOT give the same error. Also the registration page it sent me to did NOT require a cd key. Thus at this point I was able to log on & play the game.
No sweat & hope that helps someone else.
Installed the demo and the updates.
When starting the demo, it goes directly out saying “Hope you have enjoyed this demo, blablabla”
Already uninstalled and reinstalled again…same stuff…
Anyone saw this ?
Working!!!
It seems that the demo is over: You’re member since September 3rd.
The demo lasts 7 days.
Please create a new account if you want to play the demo!
You know I really wanted to buy this game,
So I get the demo first,
Gives me crap about it not being a readable version or something when it checks for update
I click to launch
It forces me to get a patch
Gives me two choices either… I click Ok then it goes to desktop…
Or click cancel and it goes to desktop.
If it wont let me play the dammed demo don’t think I’m going to buy the game.
“It forces me to get a patch
Gives me two choices either… I click Ok then it goes to desktop…
Or click cancel and it goes to desktop.”
Same here.. This game has so much bad publicity that without a demo there is no way I’m going to buy it as noone says that full version is any better than this demo. What is this company ‘Monte Cristo”? Can’t even find a company website.