The Movies

Let me let you in on a little secret for us game reviewers. Sometimes, we give games decent reviews when we personally do not like them. This is usually because we have some sort of grudge against the company, but we still need to give a game a score worthy of the game, instead of filling a page about a rant about how a company sucks. It's natural, and it happens. However, there are some games that allow you to tie in not only your hate for the company, but hate for the game- and rant all about it at the same time. The Movies is one of those games.

The Movies is a game that sets you as the god of a small movie production company- that is, a movie mogul. By working hard and developing movies, you can slowly pull yourself up from a tiny indie studio into a full monolithic corporation- all by making films starting in the silent era. Much like basically any other god game of it's kind, micromanagement is a big feature of this game, allowing you to hire stars and extras, develop scripts, work with different groups of directors, scriptwriters, staffers, and even janitors- and develop a huge studio.


Of course, the big feature of the movies is that it features a “Fully open” movie development feature, which allows anyone to create any movie they want by stringing together a bunch of premade animations and using the actors they make in-studio. By working with these movies as much as possible, one can make a full length movie and port it to .wmv format, and share it on Lionhead's website, and even possibly win an award for your efforts.

But hold on just one second here. This is Lionhead studios. Yes, Lionhead- the people who basically talked about nothing but the game “Fable” nonstop until it's release, where we all learned that it was basically not even worth looking at for two seconds. Lionhead Studios is famous for talking big and delivering little- and unfortunately, it looks like that very issue is represented in The Movies- but let me break down the game and explain why.

First off, many would think “The Movies” is about making a movie- it's not. The Movies is about the development OF movies rather than a movie itself, which, all things considered, means that 99.9% of your time on The Movies will be spent doing the same things you do in games like Sim City and The Sims- sitting around and micromanaging things that you would normally not care about. From little things like managing a actress' attitude to the development of a script, everything in The Movies is basically about making a studio, which is incredibly boring.

Second off, the movie maker in The Movies is probably one of the worst tools I have used on the PC, ever. Because they can obviously not let you have full access to the characters and the ability to make your movie from absolute scratch, the Movies basically limits you to a string of premade animations involving the main character and any extras in the area. While this would be fine for a few games, this, much like other developers of it's kind (See: RPG Maker for the PS2), means that there is no real sandbox here, rather the ability to modify things the creators threw together.


Let me give a perfect example. Upon careful examination of the examples featured on the many The Movies fan sites, anyone can notice that they all end up looking the same due to a very inflexible movie scheme. Every movie is expected to have a very defined opening, climax, and conclusion- and generally, any movie without this scheme (Or rather, any movie lacking this exact scheme in every facet) will get a bad score or bad ratings. While it is obvious that this engine was made for innovation, there is nothing innovative about it, and I can easily predict that the uniqueness of such a feature will die out in about a year.

Another major issue is that, in all honesty, the Movies is not entertaining whatsoever. While I am the first to enjoy games like The Sims, with endless management opportunities and customization abound, the Movies lacks this in virtually every form. Your studio will always generally take the same look no matter how you twist it, buildings, characters, and flora/fauna always looking the same from game to game. All of the sets are the same as always, only featuring different looks- but all fundamentally acting the same in production, especially when it comes to available scenes in the movie editor.

A lot is missing from the movies that even I, a layman to such movie making, could demand from it in a few seconds. First off, because of what I would generally consider sheer laziness, the game does not feature the capability to record your voice and splice it into the game- all of the movies created with the editor are essentially silent, with noises added in as needed. The same goes for music- even though the music featured in The Movies is decent, I found it lacking to properly get across what I wanted. Similar issues abound in about every facet of the game- from a very unwieldy stage editor to the inability to truly, 100% control all action in the movie.

Speaking of unwieldy stage editors, I should go ahead and say that, while the controls are rather irritating at best, the graphic capability in the Movies is actually a strong point. While it in no way is meant to look real, The Movies presents a very clean/cartoon look that we saw in games like The Sims, which allows for good looking movies even on a slower system. In fact, virtually everything about The Movies presentation-wise is phoned in from The Sims 2, including the GUI design and graphic quality- but nothing of that really hinders the game, it's just an interesting footnote to a game I've already acknowledged as bad.


I could say a lot more about The Movies, especially how much I've learned to not like it. Playing The Movies was like trying to force a good game out of a very bad one- my attempt to have fun with the movie maker even when it had a very simplified and base interface ,and the attempt to circumvent the whole Sims like god-mode aspect when I found that it was the real face of the game. Even though people with a lot of time and energy would surely find this game fun after lots of tweaking and learning, I regret to say that those with a short attention span will die before they find fun in the game.

So, there you have it. I was able to vent about Lionhead while truly expressing my views on The Movies. The Movies is a bad excuse for a game, with a very good idea basically turned into a very bad one with a very irritating control scheme, lack of a true purpose, a very limited movie editor, and the lack of anything I would consider good other than the ability to string together very limited movie clips to make a full movie. If you want to make movies, get off your computer, get a video camera, and get some friends- don't waste your time with this pitiful excuse for a Sim game.

2 star(s) out of 5

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