Rezzed, The PC and Indie Games Show. Brighton, 6th-7th July 2012

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We Built This City: New CitiesXL Footage

By Kieron Gillen on October 1st, 2009 at 4:16 pm.

Ah, - re-using old screenshots. It is the laziest of the posting.

It’s a four-minute overview of the whole game, plus voice-over. It features the phrase “Pretty little agricultural backwater” in the first 10 seconds. If that’s not worth watching, I don’t know what is. If you agree, you’ll find it beneath the cut.

And if you disagree, why are you here? Because you’re an obsessive clicker. I thank you for the page impressions.

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34 Comments »

  1. 01/10/2009 at 16:24 Benny says:

    But can i tell my people to drive on the left hand side of the road?

  2. 01/10/2009 at 16:31 paddytehpyro says:

    I was in the beta thingy for cities XL and it was kinda nice. Some of the features were missing ofc but still looked good. I just cant see a reason to subscribe to it though. Sure the trading thing is a bit interesting but I just cant really justify subbing to a game for a little trade window.

  3. 01/10/2009 at 16:37 Lack_26 says:

    I really liked that trailer, should I be in middle management then?

    Also, Benny, you could actually, albeit indirectly. You can set roads to be one way, built two one way roads right next to each other and you could make it left or right handed driving.

  4. 01/10/2009 at 16:39 Legionary says:

    I’m pleased to see INTERFACE NOT FINAL plastered along the bottom there, because CitiesXL seemed to be a nice game in the beta but was plagued with a really terrible interface. To make matters worse, you couldn’t really customise it to work around its issues either. Fingers crossed they sort it for release.

  5. 01/10/2009 at 16:39 Hypocee says:

    Impressive-looking game, stellar marketing video.

  6. 01/10/2009 at 16:46 Dante says:

    But here’s the real question, is Kieron going for some sort of record for RPS articles whose titles are music based puns today?

  7. 01/10/2009 at 16:47 Lucas says:

    Accordion Farming XL. That’s what the skyscraper building animation made me think of.

  8. 01/10/2009 at 16:48 mortiphago says:

    the beta was pretty nice. I wondered if they’ve balanced and improved the whole trading part. It was waaaay off. Not to mention the dreadful interface all around

  9. 01/10/2009 at 16:56 c-Row says:

    It was at 0:12! I want my money back!

  10. 01/10/2009 at 17:08 jeff says:

    I really wanted to like the demo, but as other have said, I found the interface to be completely worthless. Where is maxis to do this right?

    I am tempted to try the demo again because that video made the game look 100 times better than the pile I played in the demo.

  11. 01/10/2009 at 17:11 Eplekongen says:

    But the real question is, can I declare my city a nation and then go to war?

  12. 01/10/2009 at 17:19 Kanamit says:

    I heard that this game doesn’t have mass transit. Is that true?

    • 01/10/2009 at 18:22 Kommissar Nicko says:

      It didn’t appear to when I was in the beta. However, I will caveat that by saying my city never got bigger than podunk, and the game did not let you see any possible upgrades until just before they’d be available. (I.e. you couldn’t even know that one day you could build a highway until your city had ~50k people.)

  13. 01/10/2009 at 18:03 no says:

    Play button does nothing.

  14. 01/10/2009 at 18:11 Urthman says:

    I really want to play a Spider-Man game in a city made with that engine.

  15. 01/10/2009 at 18:14 Shadrach says:

    And, can you spawn Godzilla to wreak havoc on your citizens?

  16. 01/10/2009 at 18:42 Carra says:

    Looks promising. Tycoon game and mmo game all in one, jummie!

  17. 01/10/2009 at 19:09 lePooch says:

    I would be on this game in a moment but….

    Are they still planning to give almost nothing with the base game and then nickel and dime you to death for stuff such as public transport, larger hospitals, police stations and so on? While I can’t find it right now, I recall there being a significant amount of grumbling about this before. Did they change their minds?

  18. 01/10/2009 at 19:23 Akimbo says:

    I gave the demo a try the other day, and got a “connection lost” message twice, which took me to a screen that says “connecting” and doesn’t really do anything. Both times, it happened In the first tutorial.
    Yeah, I’m willing to let this go.

  19. 01/10/2009 at 19:40 David says:

    I played the demo of this last month, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I probably won’t be paying the subscription for the MMO section, but the singleplayer looks fantastic.

  20. 01/10/2009 at 21:07 Blurr says:

    Recently I dusted off an old copy of sim city 4 and was frankly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. This looks looks kinda like what i expected the next installment of simcity to look like same thing just bigger and better looking. But if the interface is bad then the game is lost i hope they fix it this looks fun.

  21. 01/10/2009 at 22:45 We Fly Spitfires says:

    I’m gonna build a city and then flood it with immigrants then hit it with a credit crunch and see what happens.

  22. 02/10/2009 at 00:28 innociv says:

    $6.50 a month. :/

    I MIGHT buy if it came with 3 months of online free and then was $30/year or something.

    But $100 a year + $50 for trading an a chat box is pretty much telling you to pirate it.

    I’m sure tinypic, imageshack have much beefier servers that cost them more pennies per person than this game does, and they’re free.

    All paying $6.50 a month gives you is a chat box(Hi, IRC? IRC is free. Sure, the servers cost thousands a year for large networks that have hundreds of thousands of users, but they’re able to make them free to end users.) and a trade, of which a stock ticker again is going to use more resources.
    So where does $100 a year go to? It’s a ripoff for something that should be really cheap or free.

  23. 02/10/2009 at 00:49 mejobloggs says:

    NZ too :)

  24. 03/10/2009 at 13:54 Flimgoblin says:

    Liked playing the demo, but the whole online thing felt decidedly lacking, especially for the sub fee.

  25. 04/10/2009 at 15:32 Pod says:

    Yankee style grid cities = teh bore.

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