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Preview of City Life for the Nintendo DS

 

July 9, 2008

The University Club-San Francisco, California

 

City Life is a city builder game for the Nintendo DS that is due out in the third quarter of 2008. It is a city builder, however it is not a rip off of the Sim City franchise.

 

This game focuses on the socio-economic aspects of city planning. City Life has the player design their city with an eye towards realism. For example, if a player builds an airport and they want to put housing near the airport they need to make it modestly priced housing. That is because in reality expensive housing near an airport is not going to sell, only lower priced houses will. The player is then asked to balance this out by putting good schools near the airport. That way the lower income residents have a better opportunity to advance to the higher levels on the socio-economic ladder. The goal is to create a society where people are happy and upward mobility is the norm, not the exception. As the city planner, essentially your job is to ensure that everyone achieves "The American Dream". This is a really unique take on the city building concept that I am excited to see how the game is able to pull off.

 

The game will feature all of the standard features of city building games. That includes building industry specific buildings and transportation routes in an effort to grow the population to a certain level. They will have to keep what is now a diverse population happy. The game will include many unique real world structures that players can use as landmarks in the game, including the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building and Kremlin.

 

Players will be able to build unique cities on 15 different maps in the campaign and free play mode. This will be a very interesting game to check out when it is released in a few months.

 

This concludes our coverage of the July 9 event in San Francisco. Thanks to Mario for giving me a hands on look at all of these games. I will be back in the next day or two with a look at Brothers in Arms Hells Highway for the XBOX 360.