City Life (music)

City Life is a minimalist composition by Steve Reich written in 1995. It is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 vibraphones, unpitched percussion, 2 samplers, 2 pianos, string quartet, and double bass. All instruments except the unpitched percussion are to be amplified. Its duration is 24 minutes. It uses digital samplers amongst the instruments used in performance, and these play back a wide variety of sounds and speech samples, mainly recorded by Reich himself in and around his home town of New York. These sounds include car horns, air brakes, car alarms and many other sounds associated with the city.

The use of the samplers extends the idea of using everyday sounds in music, indebted to the taxi horn in Gershwin's An American in Paris, the sirens used by Varèse, and Antheil's airplane propeller within the classical tradition as well as to rock and roll and rap. This use also harkens back to Reich's early tape pieces, such as It's Gonna Rain or Come Out. The samplers are loaded with speech and other common sounds from a busy city (car horns, door slams, air brakes, subway chimes, pile drivers, car alarms, heartbeats, boat horns, buoys, and sirens). The last movement uses bits of field communications from the New York Fire Department during the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

City Life (video game)

City Life is a city-building video game developed by Monte Cristo. It is the first modern building game to allow the player to work in full 3D environment. The game is by French developer Monte Cristo. It is published in France by Focus, in the UK and Germany by Deep Silver and in North America by CDV. It was released in May 2006.

City Life allows players to zoom in and see every little bit of detail. The placement method allows buildings to be placed at an angle, as also seen in Sierra Games' Caesar IV.

More recently, the game has been criticized for lack of many detailed elements, such as weather, disasters, and more "in depth" user control.

Summary

City Life continues the very long tradition of city-building and construction and management games, that was originally started by Utopia from developer Don Daglow and Will Wright's SimCity series by allowing the player to customize their urban city's roads, buildings, finances, ordinances and much more. City Life utilizes a three dimensional game engine in displaying cities, and also includes the requirement to satisfy six different socioeconomic groups within the city, an essential part of gameplay. The six groups include the Elites, Suits, Radical Chics, Fringe, Blue collars and Have-Nots.

Cities XL

Cities XL (originally Cities Unlimited) is a city-building video game developed by Monte Cristo as a sequel to their earlier title City Life. It was originally scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2009, but was eventually released on October 8, 2009. The game allowed players to play online and interact with others on massive persistent planets, and to work together by trading resources or building blueprints in order to satisfy the needs of city inhabitants. However, on March 8, 2010 the online service was closed and the game became single-player only.

Focus Home Interactive acquired the franchise in June 2010 and released Cities XL 2011 on October 14, 2010. The third installment, Cities XL Platinum, was released on February 14, 2013. A new version, Cities XXL, was announced on November 15, 2014, and released on February 5, 2015.

Gameplay

Beginnings as MMO

Cities XL allowed players an option to play on a persistent online virtual community known as a planet which required a monthly subscription fee. As a member of a planet, players were able to build their cities in a virtual world populated by other subscribers, trade resources such as electricity with other players, work together to create structures such as the Eiffel Tower, and visit other cities as an avatar and host events.

City Life

City Life may refer to:

See also