George Lucas...eat your heart out!
I knew The Movies was gonna be good, I just didn’t realize how good. I have been playing this sucker non-stop for the past few weeks and I still am enjoying the game as much as the first day I got it. Peter Molyneux (Fable, Black and White is a god among video game designers.
What is The Movies? Well, at first I thought it was just a game but as I got the hang of it, it is actually both a game and a movie creating tool. Sure, the main portion of the thing is a game in the vein of Theme Park or Sim City. You’re a fledging director of a new film studio and it’s your job to make your studio numero uno at the end of the line. Along the way, you gain technologies that improve your pictures, turning the once silent black and white movies into the digitalized versions we see today, complete with digital sound and whatnot. How do you do that? Why by making movies and getting famous stars to star in them of course.
A second easily overlooked part of the game is the ability to create your own movies. You can write the dialogue, decide what props to use (kinda boring but necessary), who to star, what genre it should be in, where to shoot it…things you could do in normal life if you were to direct a movie. Hell, you can add in your own audio tracks for the game and do the voices yourself if you want! Alternatively, you could get the game to make a movie for you to film and play the game totally without jumping into its movie creation tool…your choice. Being a huge fan of Aliens (the first and second movies only cause the rest suck ass) and Star Wars, I naturally tried my hand at making one. It wasn’t going to win any Oscars but I did have tons of fun making it. Hell, I even had zombies in the game running around for good measure. As anybody knows, anything with zombies in it automatically makes the movie good!
I have to warn you though, it takes a ton of time to make an entertaining movie and honestly, I spent the better part of an hour just to make a 5 minute clip as I tweaked the scenes and fine tuned it. So be warned! This is not the game you pick up for 10 minutes and then chuck it one corner.
Nonetheless, even if you opt to go all out filmmaking only, you can’t. You still need to manage your studio, hiring crews and extras for the movies, writers for the scripts and other positions. You get only a limited number of people at one time so you’ll probably be juggling them from one job to another to make the game flow smoothly. While it does add to the hectic feel of the game, I don’t particularly like this and everytime I had to make the hard decision of switching jobs for a poor schmuck, I kept wishing why the hell can’t I just hire more people? I’m the head of a freaking movie studio for goodness sake, I have money coming out of my ears and I can’t hire ONE more extra janitor to scrub my VIP toilets?
With the amount of personnel working under you, I was unpleasantly surprised that a game as polished as The Movies didn’t offer a more intuitive system to spot your various employees at a glance. Looking from the default bird’s eye view, its tough to spot who’s who as your employees run around working. It would have been more fun if there were some way to distinguish the various classes from afar.
With the game’s Starmaker system, you can create your own stars. Using online photos and a lot of trial and error, I was able to make passable copies of Harrison Ford (can’t make Star Wars without Han Solo now, can you?), Mark Hamill, Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Fisher. You can also assign attributes for the stars, so that they act better in certain movies than others. It’s a fun and quite powerful tool to mess around with and I spent more time than I should fine tuning the looks of my stars in it. Creating your own stars is better for the game than using the cookie cutter ones the game send your way. With your recognizable names of talent, you can easily fit the stars into the roles you want them to play.
Like in real life (at least I think so), stars are a **** to keep in fighting form. You need to dress then well, curb their addictions (build a rehab clinic to cure them of overeating or alcoholism), give them trailers and even the occasional nip and tuck to make them look good.
Costumes play a big part in the game. Your stars need to stay at the top of the fashion mountain to impress fans and to maintain a good mood. While the game offers a diverse selection of costumes you can use, strangely missing is the ability to mix and match your own selection.
While the game does have icons for the stars to signify if they’re busy or free, it doesn’t have any icons at all to show what genre the star is good at. Remember earlier why I said to make your own stars? One of the reasons I recommended it was that very flaw I mentioned. The ONLY way to tell what your star is best suited for it to hover around his/her icon with a mouse for a few seconds, making the pop-up bars appear. Another thing that sucks with the interface is that if you have a big stable of stars, their photos disappear from the HUD and only a small bar remains. That really sucks since you’ll need to spend time finding the star you’re looking for from the list.
The other things I hate about the game (hang on, I’m almost done with the ranting parts), is that destroying your structures is a pain in the ass. Most games of this nature simple feature a destroy or sell button to eliminate unwanted buildings, not so in The Movies. Here, you need to first find a janitor or a builder, and then pick him up and drop him at a specific spot on the building you want gone. A big hassle and a time waster as you need to disrupt your personnel’s work just to eliminate a building. Last but not least the game tends to stutter a bit as your studio expands but that’s an easily overlooked flaw.
I guess, reading what I’ve written, it might seem as if I’m dissing the game. In fact, it’s the other way around. The flaws I’ve mentioned are only noticeable because the game is so freaking polished you could see yourself in it! I love the game and even with the flaws I mentioned, I still keeping playing it over and over and over…One day, the world will see how Episodes One, Two and Three should REALLY be made…BY ME! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA! George Lucas better be wetting his pants, there be a new Star Wars director in town!