I grew up playing and loving SimCity games. Simulation games can really make the time go by faster than you can say, “Will Wright is god!” I can personally attest to that, since nothing gets me going more than being an almighty entity who’s in charge of building and managing your own city. Every aspect from your people’s wellbeing, employment and the complete (functional) infrastructure has to be attended to. If this isn’t gratifying, I don’t know what is!

Being an ardent fan of next-gen consoles, I was disappointed to find that there aren’t any notable city-building games to be found. Luckily, I’ve got my trusty PC at hand for when good SimCity-like games are released. That’s when I stumbled upon City Life 2008 Edition.

Not really bothering to buy last year’s World Edition add-on, I took the liberty of preordering my copy of the standalone City Life 2008 Edition. I quickly found out that this game deserves better reviews for the good things that come with it, save for some bad aspects (we’ll get to that later). Elements like building your city to cater to six different classes and a super-enhanced editor for you import satellite photos and build actual cities are cool. Graphics-wise, visuals appear more enhanced (think, reflective water!). My only gripe is that the scenarios are unlike those in SimCity games, where players are given actual historical situations to deal with.

I guess you can’t really have it all, eh. It’s back to the console for me, and to hoping for the much-anticipated release of Spore, THE god game to end all god games!