If it's crap... We'll tell you
The Movies Review
Being a small screenwriter like myself always had me thinking "What if this script was able to become a feature-length blockbuster?" Having this dream, I then heard of a PC game known as "The Movies," which allows you to make your own films. Realizing this, I took my money and immedietely bought it. I didn't stop after I made all of my typed out stories into blockbusters. I continued, as this game opens your mind to hundreds of movie possibilities.
The gameplay of "The Movies" is pretty easy to get into right away, but there's also enough advanced stuff to keep your interest. It runs like all of the millions of "Tycoon" games out there. You are god who is given a studio lot where you hire and fire movie staff, build sets, and of course, create and release movies. The tools used to make your own movie, which are well balanced between accesiblity and flexibility. However, the running of your studio and creating your movies both feel very different to be considered whole.
There are only two game modes, a "story" mode in which you must start out as a 1920s small fry and make it to the big leagues. There's emphasis on story because there really is none, with the exception of award ceremonies. As you start out, a voice will tell you the basics, starting with hiring people from janitors to A-List Actors. The game holds your hand for quite a while, but it depends on you if you care or not. The other mode is known as Sandbox, which is basically a free-form version of story mode, where you can set everything in the beginning, such as a pre-built studio or if your movies will be instantly created instead of waiting for the directors to finish it.
The process of creating movie seems pretty accurate to what they really do in Hollywood.There are two ways to start creating a movie. You can either let your writers come up with a script, depending on how well their experience is, or you can start from pure scratch and build your own personal masterpeice. Either way, you have to pick which genre you want your movie as. You have 5 choices, action, comedy, sci-fi, romance, and horror. What you choose also effects the general approval of the audience. Historical events, such as the Great Depression or the Moon Landing, will effect the interest of what movie-goers want to see. So if you think you should make a Comedy film while hundreds of men are dying in Vietnam, think again. After the genre is chosen and the screenplay is made, the shooting can begin. The size of your cast and crew will grow over time as you produce bigger, more-sophisticated movies. But in the end, you're always going to need a director, some actors, a movie crew, and, usually, a handful of extras. Who you choose to fill these roles will ultimately affect your end product. How experienced is your crew? What sort of mood is your talent in? Do the director and the lead actor get along well? Though it can make the process of casting your movies quite maddening, it's actually rather impressive to realize the minute details that can have an impact. I actually think my guys did an imitation of that Christian Bale incident once! XD
You don't have much control once shooting commences, though that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep a watchful eye over the production. Though most of your employees are basically set to auto-create, actors and directors are much more of a hassle and emotionally exhausted at times. Their true characters will often be revealed under the stress of filming, informed by a dozen or so different personalities unique to each person. Most of your problems basically come down to stress, and how your star deals with it. A stressed-out actor or director won't do a very good performance, and he or she will often turn to food and drink for comfort. This is tolerable, but some people have a greater weakness toward breakdowns than others, which, if left unchecked, can bring a production to a screeching halt. In turn, this can send the cost of your production through the roof as you send the person to a private rehab center.
There are stress factors aside from production, too, most of which are based on your star's ego. If your star feels he or she isn't getting paid enough, his or her trailer isn't nice enough, he or she doesn't have a big enough entourage, or he or she's generally unhappy about his or her personal appearance, they WILL get angry. Most of these problems are solved simply with pay raises, better trailers, personal assistants, makeovers, plastic surgery, and/or press exposure. There's a lot of information to sift through, and the game usually does a good job of surfacing what's important, though at times the screen can be smothered with info bubbles. It's fun to see how your stars grow and change while living under the spotlight, but over time you'll see behavioral patterns emerging over and over again, which means the constant personal treatment can get exhausting.
As time passes, your star will begin to grow old and eventually retire when they reach 70 years, if they're with you that long. Here comes one of the most interesting parts the Movies When you start out, you'll have hundred of Hollywood hopefuls looking for a shot at the big time, but when you expand your business, you can soon realize that you may not have enough janitors to keep the lot clean, which means you may have to demote some of your stars to fill in things of more importance other than movie making. As a tycoon game, this is normal, but it just ain't how Hollywood does it!
Keeping your studio up-to-date and full with the correct facilities needed can be just as tiring as taking care of your spoiled stars. The audience of your movies will get easily annoyed if the same set is used over and over again. Most sets aren't available right away, but they can be unlocked over time, but it can be sped up by hiring scientists to research the sets faster, keeping you more in the time than the competition.
There is a whole lot going on in The Movies, but the game is smart about letting you determine your own pace, and you can even scale the amount of assistance the game provides. Once you find your gait, the experience can be really addictive, and the constant production pattern of making movies and improving your back lot make it quite easy to ignore the fact that, all of a sudden, it's four in the morning and you're still playing.
Anyone familiar with digital video editing will find the Post-Production stage of your movie to be like a Playskool version of something like Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas. You fill in your story by dragging and dropping prebuilt shots, of which there are literally dozens to choose from for any one portion of the story arc. Like the rest of the game, the moviemaker can be tuned to give you just the amount of control you're comfortable with. If you're happy with just dragging and dropping a few scenes into a timeline and letting that be that, you can operate that way...though the real fun here is getting really crazy with the details, such as lighting, the mood of the performances, the backdrop designs, the types of camera angles used, and so on. You can even add subtitles, sound effects, your own custom musical score, and, if you've got a microphone, your own dialog. Given the dozens of different sets you'll eventually have at your disposal, in addition to the five different genres you can work within and the insane amount of control you can take over virtually every single detail of your movie, there is a great amount of potential here for budding virtual filmmakers.
Unfortunately, you can pour hours into creating your own perfect piece of machinima, and it will have minimal impact inside the game itself, as the game judges the quality of the films rather mechanically, without much capacity to discern between what's garbage and what's art. In a way, this is acceptable, since the end product of the movie you've made is really the best reward. Plus, the game makes it quite easy to export the movies you've made into a common video format that you can share with others. There's even an integrated tool that makes it easy to upload your movies to the Internet for all of your Youtube friends to see.
The sound design is a good match for the general tone of the game. The background music that plays while you manage your studio will change as you progress through different time periods, from brassy big-band accompaniments, to buzzy Hendrixian guitars, to funky wah-wah sounds, and beyond. There's some good, funny voice work in the game, with different news readers and disc jockeys delivering era-related jokes over your studio's PA system, though all the "dialogue" in your movies is spoken in a Sims-esque gibberish that's not nearly as annoying as it's EA counterpart.
This is a game of high quality, and it shows in every aspect of gameplay. The Movies comes very VERY close into becoming the game that Lionhead thought it would be. Being a movie studio boss is entertaining, and there is really no other game, or, really, any piece of software that makes it so easy to build your own little movies. But the connection between these concepts is thin at best. Thankfully, its redeeming qualities WAY make up for it to make The Movies a game well worth playing.
AxelReviews
Movie Maker
Posts: 223
Joined: Sat Mar 07, 2009 1:09 am
Private message
The gameplay of "The Movies" is pretty easy to get into right away, but there's also enough advanced stuff to keep your interest. It runs like all of the millions of "Tycoon" games out there. You are god who is given a studio lot where you hire and fire movie staff, build sets, and of course, create and release movies. The tools used to make your own movie, which are well balanced between accesiblity and flexibility. However, the running of your studio and creating your movies both feel very different to be considered whole.
There are only two game modes, a "story" mode in which you must start out as a 1920s small fry and make it to the big leagues. There's emphasis on story because there really is none, with the exception of award ceremonies. As you start out, a voice will tell you the basics, starting with hiring people from janitors to A-List Actors. The game holds your hand for quite a while, but it depends on you if you care or not. The other mode is known as Sandbox, which is basically a free-form version of story mode, where you can set everything in the beginning, such as a pre-built studio or if your movies will be instantly created instead of waiting for the directors to finish it.
The process of creating movie seems pretty accurate to what they really do in Hollywood.There are two ways to start creating a movie. You can either let your writers come up with a script, depending on how well their experience is, or you can start from pure scratch and build your own personal masterpeice. Either way, you have to pick which genre you want your movie as. You have 5 choices, action, comedy, sci-fi, romance, and horror. What you choose also effects the general approval of the audience. Historical events, such as the Great Depression or the Moon Landing, will effect the interest of what movie-goers want to see. So if you think you should make a Comedy film while hundreds of men are dying in Vietnam, think again. After the genre is chosen and the screenplay is made, the shooting can begin. The size of your cast and crew will grow over time as you produce bigger, more-sophisticated movies. But in the end, you're always going to need a director, some actors, a movie crew, and, usually, a handful of extras. Who you choose to fill these roles will ultimately affect your end product. How experienced is your crew? What sort of mood is your talent in? Do the director and the lead actor get along well? Though it can make the process of casting your movies quite maddening, it's actually rather impressive to realize the minute details that can have an impact. I actually think my guys did an imitation of that Christian Bale incident once! XD
You don't have much control once shooting commences, though that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep a watchful eye over the production. Though most of your employees are basically set to auto-create, actors and directors are much more of a hassle and emotionally exhausted at times. Their true characters will often be revealed under the stress of filming, informed by a dozen or so different personalities unique to each person. Most of your problems basically come down to stress, and how your star deals with it. A stressed-out actor or director won't do a very good performance, and he or she will often turn to food and drink for comfort. This is tolerable, but some people have a greater weakness toward breakdowns than others, which, if left unchecked, can bring a production to a screeching halt. In turn, this can send the cost of your production through the roof as you send the person to a private rehab center.
There are stress factors aside from production, too, most of which are based on your star's ego. If your star feels he or she isn't getting paid enough, his or her trailer isn't nice enough, he or she doesn't have a big enough entourage, or he or she's generally unhappy about his or her personal appearance, they WILL get angry. Most of these problems are solved simply with pay raises, better trailers, personal assistants, makeovers, plastic surgery, and/or press exposure. There's a lot of information to sift through, and the game usually does a good job of surfacing what's important, though at times the screen can be smothered with info bubbles. It's fun to see how your stars grow and change while living under the spotlight, but over time you'll see behavioral patterns emerging over and over again, which means the constant personal treatment can get exhausting.
As time passes, your star will begin to grow old and eventually retire when they reach 70 years, if they're with you that long. Here comes one of the most interesting parts the Movies When you start out, you'll have hundred of Hollywood hopefuls looking for a shot at the big time, but when you expand your business, you can soon realize that you may not have enough janitors to keep the lot clean, which means you may have to demote some of your stars to fill in things of more importance other than movie making. As a tycoon game, this is normal, but it just ain't how Hollywood does it!
Keeping your studio up-to-date and full with the correct facilities needed can be just as tiring as taking care of your spoiled stars. The audience of your movies will get easily annoyed if the same set is used over and over again. Most sets aren't available right away, but they can be unlocked over time, but it can be sped up by hiring scientists to research the sets faster, keeping you more in the time than the competition.
There is a whole lot going on in The Movies, but the game is smart about letting you determine your own pace, and you can even scale the amount of assistance the game provides. Once you find your gait, the experience can be really addictive, and the constant production pattern of making movies and improving your back lot make it quite easy to ignore the fact that, all of a sudden, it's four in the morning and you're still playing.
Anyone familiar with digital video editing will find the Post-Production stage of your movie to be like a Playskool version of something like Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas. You fill in your story by dragging and dropping prebuilt shots, of which there are literally dozens to choose from for any one portion of the story arc. Like the rest of the game, the moviemaker can be tuned to give you just the amount of control you're comfortable with. If you're happy with just dragging and dropping a few scenes into a timeline and letting that be that, you can operate that way...though the real fun here is getting really crazy with the details, such as lighting, the mood of the performances, the backdrop designs, the types of camera angles used, and so on. You can even add subtitles, sound effects, your own custom musical score, and, if you've got a microphone, your own dialog. Given the dozens of different sets you'll eventually have at your disposal, in addition to the five different genres you can work within and the insane amount of control you can take over virtually every single detail of your movie, there is a great amount of potential here for budding virtual filmmakers.
Unfortunately, you can pour hours into creating your own perfect piece of machinima, and it will have minimal impact inside the game itself, as the game judges the quality of the films rather mechanically, without much capacity to discern between what's garbage and what's art. In a way, this is acceptable, since the end product of the movie you've made is really the best reward. Plus, the game makes it quite easy to export the movies you've made into a common video format that you can share with others. There's even an integrated tool that makes it easy to upload your movies to the Internet for all of your Youtube friends to see.
The sound design is a good match for the general tone of the game. The background music that plays while you manage your studio will change as you progress through different time periods, from brassy big-band accompaniments, to buzzy Hendrixian guitars, to funky wah-wah sounds, and beyond. There's some good, funny voice work in the game, with different news readers and disc jockeys delivering era-related jokes over your studio's PA system, though all the "dialogue" in your movies is spoken in a Sims-esque gibberish that's not nearly as annoying as it's EA counterpart.
This is a game of high quality, and it shows in every aspect of gameplay. The Movies comes very VERY close into becoming the game that Lionhead thought it would be. Being a movie studio boss is entertaining, and there is really no other game, or, really, any piece of software that makes it so easy to build your own little movies. But the connection between these concepts is thin at best. Thankfully, its redeeming qualities WAY make up for it to make The Movies a game well worth playing.
AxelReviews
Movie Maker
Posts: 223
Joined: Sat Mar 07, 2009 1:09 am
Private message
Follow Spill on Twitter!
Latest Activity
This is a meet up group for New York Spillers, It’s less about partying but more about socializing with Spill members and anybody else that’s interested in attending.
Music
© 2009 Created by The Spill Crew
