Cities XL Review  Cities XL tries to expand the city-building
genre with new ideas, but the solo game is generic, and the
online features aren't ready for a ground-breaking ceremony.
Cities XL isn't as supersized as its title would have you
believe. Monte Cristo's latest attempt to knock the venerable
SimCity off its throne delivers when it comes to standard city-
building genre features, but its massively multiplayer online-
style mode, where you interact with virtual city planners across
the globe, fails to deliver. Not all of the ground-breaking
elements are fully realized out of the box, so you're left with
a pretty conventional city builder with a few innovations that
hold promise for revolutionizing the genre sometime down the
road.  Laying out huge stretches of city blocks is a snap.
Instant blue-collar ghetto!  The basics of Cities XL are pretty
much what you would expect. This is essentially a revision of
the now-classic SimCity formula, somewhat similar to that on
display in Monte Cristo's previous C