Categorizing The Movies, Peter Molyneux’s next game for PC and Xbox, is incredibly difficult. The number of things you can do and manipulate within the game is almost enough to make you dizzy, so placing the game under a single genre’s umbrella is a lesson in futility. But, with a user-friendly interface and the ability to manage things as little or as much as you like, it’s remarkably a very easy game to get into. Just trying to cover the entire game in less than 10,000 words would be impossible, but we’ll do our best here to help you decide if this is a game that’ll keep your interest. And don’t worry, we’ll do it in far less than 10,000 words.
Story Mode
The story mode in The Movies starts in the 1920s, before movies even had sound. You build up your studio “empire” by hiring the right people and making the right types of films, hints for which will be given by news reports who appear sporadically throughout the game talking about what could be the next Big Picture. For instance, if something is discovered in space, a new sci-fi movie could sell better than a romantic saga. As time passes in the game, new technology becomes available, opening up not just more and more options in the movie-making process, but also for your films’ plots. Or, if you want to really get a jump on things, you can hire your own research team to invent technology that will speed up your progress and make your studio the hottest in the land.
Looking at the screenshots, The Movies might be mistaken for a Sims clone. It does share a few similarities, but where The Movies is so different is in that gamers aren’t messing around with people’s lives for random fun, they’re planning the next blockbuster picture and making sure their people are ready to make it a good one. Gamers can dig into the characters’ “real-world” relationships, maybe even get the media involved to do publicity stunts, or you can just let them fly on their own.
Let’s say you spot one of your best directors stumbling around the lot drunk. Clicking on her, you’ll see that her stress level is maxed out and something needs to be done. But rather than dealing with her real issues, you decide to have a little fun and place her at the bottom of a water tower. She looks up at the tower inquisitively and starts climbing up. Once she’s on top, she dangles her feet over the edge before jumping off in an apparent suicide attempt. Before she hits the ground, a little parachute pops out of her back to save her from certain death.
OK, now that you’ve had your fun, you pick her up and suspended her in the air, revealing tiny sparkling trails that lead to things the character might want to do. As in the rest of the game, these are only suggestions and can be completely ignored, but chances are that the guidance will be appreciated. Out of the goodness of our heart, we’d take her along the trail leading to the rehab building, dropping her inside to start “detoxing.” The whole scenario may seem unfortunate for your studio, but since you’re in charge of publicity too, you could consider turning it into a positive by mousing over to the news building and selecting a group of reporters to point back at her. One click later, and you’ll see the paparazzi in front of the clinic taking pictures for the papers. Remember, this is Hollywood; there’s no such thing as bad news. Interest in your movie goes up.
As another example, let’s say the lead actress you’re planning to feature in your picture hasn’t worked in a while, meaning she’s pulled a Kirstie Alley and gotten a little fat. You find her at a restaurant and drag her into the street. One of her tiny “to do” trails leads to a workout area, so you drop her there. Unimpressed with the idea, she ignores your suggestion and starts walking off toward the restaurant again. Alright, it looks like this is going to be more expensive. So you pick her up again and drop her into the liposuction area of the plastic-surgery building. After some time behind a curtain, the actress emerges with bandages, holding her stomach as she walks. But what’s this? A breast-enlargement booth in the building? Why not? So you drop her in there, and when she emerges from surgery her breasts are noticeably larger. Again, this is Hollywood. Silicone Valley.
If your actors aren’t getting along with one another, their performances together will suffer, and your movie may suffer as well. To alleviate the problem, you can build bars, restaurants and other forms of entertainment to help them get along, but this leads to other situations and relationships that you can choose to deal with or ignore. Or you can just fire everyone who doesn’t work in concert with your “vision.”
Playing around with all of these aspects of the game, you may have forgotten one little detail: your movie needs a script. On the lot is a set of writers you’ve hired, so you pick one who excels in the type of movie you want to make. After dropping the writer in front of a desk, you can come up with the move title yourself or allow the built-in name generator to spin through variations until you find one that makes you laugh. A gauge appears below the writer to show his or her progress, and if things start to move more slowly than you’d like, you can always throw-in an additional writer to speed things up.
Movie Making
Keeping with the “do what you want” theme, one of Peter Molyneux’s calling cards, The Movies features a movie-making process that lets players get as deep or as shallow as they’d like. Pick a scene, a set, the time of day and weather, and you’ll be on your way. Every option has defaults that branch off one another based on your earlier decisions in the game, so creating simple movies is always easy. Community mod support, which is also expected, should make things even easier, as players won’t even have to create their own sets, backdrops, props, etc.
Choosing from your group of actors (some now thinner and with larger breasts), you can drag and drop your cast into boxes that describe the different roles in your movie. Once there, they can then be moved to wardrobe and makeup to adjust their hair, nails, makeup, hats, outfits, eye color, lipstick color … basically, everything that you could ever want to adjust.
Even the animations for each scene can be customized, although that might be more for the truly hardcore gamers. For those in need of a bit more handholding, ourselves included, The Movies comes with hundreds of animations categorized by type, be it fighting, dancing, talking, kissing or whatever you’re in the mood to film. A little window in the corner shows you dummies performing the actions you’re thinking of selecting, so it’s easy to verify that the animation is what you’re looking for.
With sets, cast and story in place, it’s time to get your actors to the set and start rolling. Let’s say you’ve picked a graveyard in which to film a kung fu fight. After selecting your fight routine, the game gives you different variants of what you selected. For kung-fu fighting it lets you adjust the violence level, camera angle and so forth. Once you’ve filmed a few scenes, head over to the movie editor to polish things up.
If you’ve ever edited a birthday party video on your computer, you’ll probably find yourself right at home. The Movies includes the basic film editing tools, with elements such as a timeline, soundtrack and special effects, among other things. The Movies also allows you to output your creation in any standard movie format for easy distribution or burning to CD/DVD.
With this movie-editing functionality, it’s no surprise that community competitions are planned, or that the developers are hoping to have Red vs. Blue-type movies emerge online. To make it even more tempting, a Sandbox Mode gives you everything right from the start, so the creativity will start to flow the minute you open the box.
The Movies is a game with many layers. At its core, it’s a user-friendly scripting engine and movie editor. Players can just have fun making movies and ignore the rest if they so choose. But sitting on top of this core is a movie studio simulator that’s amazingly deep and fun to play. To see how well these things come together in the end, check back with DailyGame when The Movies ships this fall.
— Robert Dusseau