The Movies captures the best of the elements found in tycoon games, and adds a ton of new ones to make it a great game.
User Rating: 9 | The Movies PC
Hot off the heels of Fable: The Lost Chapters, and Black and White 2, Lionhead Studios has released a truely genuine and one of a kind tycoon game. When you think of tycoon games, you instantly think of Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Sim City, but what The Movies does best is take all of the great features of tycoon games, and adds a whole new dimension to it. In The Movies, you are an aspiring studio owner. In order to beat the competition and reach the top of the studio charts, you must hire actors, build sets, write scripts, and much more. Most of the game (if you so chose) will be played like a tycoon game, putting you in charge of running the studio, making it look better, and interacting with your stars and actors. For those of you into movie making, there is a completely different way to go. In addition to the tycoon type gameplay, there is the advanced/custom movie making feature. Though it takes a while to unlock, you will eventually be able to select from literally thousands of animations and piece a masterpiece of your own together. I highly recommend that you go ahead and let the scriptwriters write your scripts for you for a while so you can get a feel of how long each movie should be, and what animations are better than others. Without knowing what to do when creating a movie, it will take you hours upon hours just to get a two minute movie set up. Overall though, making movies is very fun, along with controlling how the movie studio operates. Back to making your movie studio work, you have a ton of stuff to do in order to reach the top. First, your stars have to be high ranked on the star charts. You'll have to improve their image, give them eventual raises, provide them with a trailer and provide them with an entourage. You also need your stars to interact with each other, both for high chemistry in movies and to get their star rating up. And finally, you have to make sure that they're always occupied with something to do, but not too stressed out by work. If so, then your movie quality will suffer. You also have to make sure that your stars remain "sober" to the two types of addictions--food and drink. If that happens, you have to put them in rehab in order to "kick the habit." In addition to having high ranking stars, in order for your studio to be a high ranking one, you must have high charting movies. First, you need good scriptwriting. At the beginning, your scriptwriting will be bad, but as your scriptwriters write more movies, they'll get better. Of course, your actors must be good, like I explained earlier. You also have to make sure though that you don't use actors to often, or people will get bored of the same people in movies. Another thing that cannot be used too often is the sets, if they do then the movie will suffer as well. If you manage to avoid all of these obstacles however, you will make a very good movie. Looking back on all I had to write explaining how to make a good movie, and studio, I realized that there's way to much stuff to do in this game just to make a movie. It does show you how hard the movie-making process is, but I really don't want to have to worry about sending stars to rehab, and making sure that they get press attention. So in short, the gameplay in The Movies is very good, but very detailed, so at some point, you will be tired of having to move around all the time instead of being able to sit and watch. However, it's still a great idea, and if you are at all interested in making movies, this is a great tool. The graphics in The Movies are also really good. Most strategy/tycoon games do look good at a distance, but if you zoom in, it looks really bad. The Movies, however, retains very good graphics both up close and far away. There's nothing else really to say about the graphics other than that they're really good in pretty much every way you think of it. The sound in The Movies is also fantastic. While you are playing, it's got sort of a movie-themed radio station to tell you about the happenings in the studio world, the real world, play music, and entertain you with lots of funny jokes. For example, a voice will come up and say that you have more people in line to become actors, so that you can immediately go and pick which ones you like. They will also announce when award ceremonies are coming up too. The radio personality (which is very accurate as you move from time period to time period), will tell you about what is happening in the real world at that time. Wars may be going on, or teenagers may be rebelling, but believe it or not, you will need to know this stuff and how it effects the movies you make and what genres to select. In addition to notifying you about things going on, the radio personalities are all very good for comic relief. Every time you see them come on, they'll crack a time-appropriate joke, some of which will have you rolling on the floor with laughter. Some, however, are a little risque. In the Cold War era, you'll hear a bunch of crude comments about communism and communists. Some of the stuff they'll say will have you saying "Oh my goodness, I can't believe he said that," but nonetheless, it's time-appropriate, and very accurate. Overall, there may be a ton of stuff to do in The Movies, but when it comes down to fun, The Movies captures the heart and soul of the movie making business, and gives the power to you at your fingertips, and it's an absolute joy. If you are at all interested in Movies, then you should definately go out and buy this game. 
