The Movies Review

For being a multi-billion dollar business, the world of video games has relatively few stars. One of these stars is Peter Molineux, of Lionhead Studios, who just released his latest game, called “The Movies”. The Movies lets you run a Hollywood movie studio from the 1920s on, making films, dealing with stars, and managing the business.

At first The Movies plays pretty much like any other “Tycoon” game. You place buildings on your studio grounds, hire stars and several types of other employees, try to increase their skills, and make money with movies. You need to layout the buildings intelligently, to shorten the ways, and you need to place paths. You need to place ornaments to make the place pretty. And you need to do research, which opens up new buildings which you can place and new movie-making technologies.

Where The Movies “claim to fame” kicks in, is when you pretty early in the game you get the building which enables you to script your own movies. That opens up a tool which enables you to let your creativity go wild, and create your own movies. There are dozens of pre-scripted short sequences, which you can put together to form a whole movie of a couple of minutes length. You can modify these sequences, cut them, put sub-titles, music, speech bits, and you can even record your own sound-bites and add them. You can spend hours in creating a perfect movie and then publish it on the The Movies website, for other people to see. As a creativity tool this movie maker is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and on the website you can see some really great mechanime films created with it.

Unfortunately the tool has no influence whatsoever on the management part of the game. Your movies are hits or flops based on the experience scores of the director, actors, and crew, and on the novelty value of the technology and scenery used. Whether you let the movie be written by an automated NPC scriptwriter or spend several hours carefully assembling an artistic masterpiece doesn’t change anything. The computer is unable to recognize art, and even unable to recognize content. Hacking together a movie with all the latest backdrops and props, even if the story doesn’t make any sense at all, will give you the best financial success. You could say this adds realism to the game, there is no money in art. So the movie maker part for the average player remains a toy to fool around with sometimes, an optional part which doesn’t advance the game. For the mechanime fan, the best solution is to find a cheat that opens up all backdrops and props, and then forget about the game, and just use the creativity tool.

The management game part of The Movies isn’t bad, although I find it a bit on the hard side. Even if you hire all the unemployed people applying at your studio, you will often be short of employees, and be forced to let the litter rest on the floor and use your janitor as minor actor in your movie. That gets especially bad when at one point in the game suddenly every one of your stars insists that he needs an “entourage”, a gofer running errands for him. The game doesn’t have any way to encourage more people to apply for jobs with you by offering better pay, the number of unemployed people showing up only depends on the success rating of your studio. So you get caught in a viscous cycle where you can’t increase your success because you lack people, and you can’t get more people because you don’t have success.

Fortunately the money part of the game is a lot easier. If you don’t mind being rated mediocre, and missing out at all the Oscar award ceremonies, at least you won’t go broke. The graphics are modern, and watching your stars acting out movies in the sets and seeing the filmed results is fun enough. There is nothing really innovative in the management part of the game, but if you liked games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, you will like The Movies as well.

It is the movie maker tool which makes The Movies unique, but this tool is kind of detached from the game, and has to be judged independently. Whether you like management game, and whether you like creating your own movies are two very different pairs of shoes. In “Tycoon” games, The Movie is just one of many. As a creativity tool it is unique, and well worth Peter Molineux’s star status.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:39 AM Permanent Link