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Peter Molyneux is at it again. The latest project from the Molyneux-led Lionhead Studios is The Movies, a game where you can manage your own Hollywood movie studio. The game gives you a lot of control over the process including building the actual studio and keeping tabs on the staff, but it also lets you make your own movies with a very complex and intricate tool. The Movies doesn’t mix both of these aspects as well as it could have, but nonetheless the game is solid throughout.
In The Movies, you’ll take control of a small, circa 1920 studio movie and slowly make it into one of the biggest names in Hollywood. You’ll start with the menial tasks like hiring people to build the studio and janitors to make sure it looks appealing. You’ll also have to carefully pick your people to see who you want as your star (and delegate the others to be crew or extras). The game does a good job pacing the different aspects and avoids throwing too much at you before you can handle it. It’s really addictive to manage the studio but particularly addictive to make your own movies. You’ll find yourself playing The Movies long into the night.
As I mentioned above, one of the biggest parts of The Movies is actually running the studio. You’ll have to manage the overall well-being of the studio to make sure everything is profitable but you’ll also have to micro-manage smaller details. For instance, you need to make sure that your stars are happy with their appearance, trailer, crew, and salary. You can address these problems by increasing salaries, hiring additional crew members for them, giving them a better trailer, or having them go through plastic surgery if they don’t feel pretty enough. Despite all of your care, your stars will eventually retire. However, if you don’t take care of them, they’ll quit. Conversely, if you don’t want to take care of them, you can always sell them to another studio.
Aside from managing the actual talent, you have to make sure that the actual studio keeps improving. This means adding additional sets and lots to make more and bigger movies than previously. You’ll have to keep getting additional stuff to keep the audience interested in what you’re studio is doing. If you’re too repetitive, you’ll notice that the attendance will go down. The game lets you hire a research and development team to make the sets and final movie even flashier.
The actual moviemaking process is quite involved. You can hire some screenwriters to write a screenplay (or write your own), pick the film’s genre (which is dependent on the time period – not all genres work as well in different eras), choose the cast, get a crew, and get some extras in there. If you don’t want to delve further, you don’t have to since the game will handle it on its own.
If you get really into the whole process, you can find yourself having much more control over it all. For example, the game lets you drop scenes into the film with a pretty powerful film editing tool. This also means that you’ll have to set the lighting, camera angles, and so forth. You can also add music, sound effects, and even subtitles to the film. The game lets you export these movies to regular video files and lets you easily upload the films onto the Web. Once you’re done with the film, the game judges the film with some sort of algorithm though you’ll find that it is usually accurate.
The game’s visuals fit its style very well. The Movies borrows the exaggerated look of The Sims and does a good job of fitting the style in the game’s own context. The character models are pretty decent, and the same could be said of the different backdrops that you can have movies set in. You’ll find a good variety of different backdrops in the game but nothing is vividly detailed. The game runs well on older PCs though it will easily max the power of your PC even if it is fairly up to date.
The game’s sound is pretty good. The sound effects are effective and help bring everything together. The voice acting is solid with plenty of different people talking over the studio’s public announcement system. The dialogue in actual movies is comprised of fake language but thankfully that doesn’t detract from the sense of accomplishment. Era-specific background music plays so you’ll everything from some techno-ish sounds, to orchestras to some rock.
As you probably noticed from my review, The Movies is two very distinct products – a tycoon, studio manager of sorts and a detailed movie making piece of software. The game doesn’t intertwine them as well as it should, but The Movies has enough going for it to make it easily recommendable. It manages to engage people in a concept that is so different, so unique that it helps the game excel in many areas. -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Nov 9, 2005
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