Others say...

"Room For Improvement"
I recently reinstalled The Movies after several failed attempts to 'complete' the game - and thus my review is based on a mixture of the two experiences. Essentially the Movies mixes several games/genres - tycoon series, The Sims, and Sim City - to give you the opportunity to build, manage, and operate a movie studio from the ground up. There are two modes of play - sandbox and tycoon - but I'll focus on the latter. Here are the main features/areas of play in the Movies:

Time: The game follows a chronological scheme which starts you in the 1920s and the dawn of moviemaking - in part to allow you to get accustomed to the game. As time goes on, you'll be able to create more complicated movies. Time also plays a factor in determining what's cool - both in terms of what genres of movies are popular (if it at all) and what clothes/looks your stars will want to rock. This makes the game more dynamic but the time is a bit skewed - the films are annoyingly boring and simple in the beginning and extremely stressful in later times making it much harder to manage your stars.

Staff: You are responsible for hiring and managing all staff as needed. Obviously the main staff you'll be managing are the stars themselves - from what they wear to who they're friends with to their stress levels to their addictions to their annoyance with a lack of entourage/large trailer/big salary - you've got to micromanage them as a main task in the game. Along the way you're also responsible for keeping an eye out for and hiring researchers, writers, repair personnel, janitors and extras. One of the big flaws of the game is the lack of staff - particularly when you have to assign them as entourage members of your various stars.

Design: Your studio lot is relatively big - but NOT big enough to house every set the game makes available to you over time. Customization is limited to decorating the studio lot with ornaments, particularly around the trailers of your stars, and can get really tedious. You'll pretty much build every item the game gives you and its always fun to explore a new set.

Awards/Game Goals: In the Tycoon mode you'll attend an awards ceremony every 5 years to collect various awards from "Most Prolific Star" to "Best Employer" to "Best Directing" - but really the REAL awards are the ones you as a player collect. There are about 8-9 levels of excellence you can aim for and each level comes with a set of goals. Some of the goals are very task-specific such as producing your first four-star movie or building up a 5-star celebrity (very hard to do btw). Other goals are more generic and will generally be achieved just by playing the game such as releasing 20 movies or winning 40 awards. Each time you complete a set of goals you'll be given an unlockable reward such as a new set or a better scriptwriting facility. The toughest set of goals is probably the 2nd last as it has some very specific tasks.

Movie Making - Of course this is a big part of the game, but only if you want it to be. The game lets you kind of run on autopilot by having scriptwriters create your scripts and simply releasing them, but you can also get in-depth into movie making by selecting the scenes, action, sets, costumes, effects and other post-production effects once the film is done. The filmmaking isn't extremely deep though - you basically choose a set, then choose a pre-mapped interaction for that scene, and alter it as you see fit according to some pre-set options (ex: an actor's expression can be changed from angry to sad to happy depending on what the scene calls for). Although its fun to make a (relatively) sensical movie, the game also lets you get away with jumbling a bunch of scenes together as well.

Overall this is a really fun, but quite challenging game, simply owing to the depth of play. Also be warned, it can be taxing on your computer, particularly if you have a weak graphics card. I liked that the game allows you to choose what you want to focus on to a degree, even within the tycoon mode. You can ignore some of the features it includes and take advantage of others that you're more interested in, which is nice. My advice is to do a practice run, maybe even in sandbox mode, and to look up some of the free online tips and guides out there - they really helped improve my gameplay this time around to the point where I'm on the last level of play before completing the game!

"Oh so close to being in the same company of Civilization 4"
I waited years for this game to be released. I first came upon it in a computer magazine. It wa sin development for at least 2 years. The previews looked fantastic. So much to do, but the greatest part of this game was going to be making movies, editing, and watching your possible masterpiece. Sadly, it was hyped as the most anticipated game but it didn't live up to the hype.
The graphics weren't bad. They sort of resembled the Sims2 graphics with almost the same language. Building the actual movie set and studio was a fresh and unique way to start the game. Hiring script writers (or you can write it yourself), actors, extras, and scientists were pretty good. Hiring janitors and construction workers was a very demanding task that quickly got frustrating. I can understand you have to build trailers, bathrooms, bars, and resturants but it was slightly taking away from the main part of this game---making movies. Being a realism freak and the fact that I love buisness sims, I thought I was not going to get any sleep when this game was released. I was going to make masterpieces. Alien movies, horror flicks, love story with a twist, oh I was waiting for the release date. I was shocked to see that you only get a small tidbit to make the movie. The scenes were short. Your movie was only a couple of minutes. This was a letdown. With todays computers as well as 2 years ago and the ability to buy large capacity hard drives for low prices, I thought Lionhead would of allowed players to make feature films possibly 30min-2hrs in length obviously that would take a huge amount of space but what Im saying is 3-5 minutes of a whole film is nothing. I had high hopes but it was somewhat of a letdown. Time seemed to go very fast (its not turn based).
I did have fun with the game but everytime Im making a movie, I get that dissapointed look when my movie, after months of shooting and getting the scenes right, is completed all 5 minutes of it. Sadly it's not enough to keep you playing. The expansion pack for this game (Stunts) does add some renewed excitement but it quickly vanishes since the length of the movies remained the same and its slightly buggy.

"Totally Addicting but Infuriatingly Frustrating"
I was talking with a friend about another game before when he said, "How can you like it? I'm addicted to it, but I don't like it!" I didn't understand what he was saying until I played "The Movies."

Where to begin? This game is one of the most insanely frustrating games I have ever played. It's meant to work as both an RPG simulator game and a movie making tool. I haven't played many RPG sims, but this is a lot of aggravation to go through to make a movie. Let's start with the bugs. Sometimes the actors show up as black blobs instead of actors. Sometimes, when costuming the actors for a scene in the movie, the actors torso will appear as a formless white shape so that you can't see what their costume looks like. Actors will sometime play roles or wear costumes that you didn't assign to them. In the movies, the actors will make annoying mumbling noises unless you insert a microphone and dub over them. The microphone leads to a whole different set of bugs all together.

When the game starts, you have to build a studio from scratch. You also need to hire employees to write scripts, act in the movies, direct the movies, be extras for the movies, build and maintain buildings, clean the lot, and research movie technology. Directors and actors fall under the same category in the game, but you'll probably use them interchangeably. In fact, you'll probably use all of your employees interchangeably, because only a handful of applicants apply for the jobs on your lot. Making movies stars out as a lengthy process of putting screenwriters to work on a script, casting the script, making sure the script has enough employees attached to it, and then filming on the sets you pay the studios budget to put up. Once the movie is finished, it's reviewed. And then the reviews torment you for using a maintenance man as a star and a screenwriter as a director because you didn't have enough actors and directors to commit to making multiple movies at a time, something you'll need to do if you want to make any money at all in the game.

You also need to let your employees have fun without getting drunk, and letting them have fun will stretch out the amount of time it takes to make your movies. You also have to build trailers and nurse relationships between the actors to keep them from quitting. Plus, running the studio is often interrupted by an awards ceremony. It's fun at first, but after a while I ended up fast forwarding through the ceremonies to see if my studio won anything. The game starts in the 20's and continues to move through time until it goes into the future and doesn't stop. Also, moviemaking processes evolve faster than they did in real life, and there's no way to choose which technology you want to incorporate into which movie, so don't count of producing a film noir in glorious black and white in the 1940's.

It's possible to attempt making movies without stressing over the strategy element in the game's "sandbox" mode. Unfortunately, options in the sandbox mode must be unlocked by earning certain amounts of money, winning certain awards, garnering good reviews, and babying movie stars in the main game mode. You even have to unlock the ability to write your own "scripts." This process consists of stringing together different animated sequences, ranging from a secretary seducing her boss to a zombie getting stabbed in the head. There are thousands of combinations of animations possible. Still, there aren't enough possibilities. While you get to control certain elements, such as violence level during fight scenes and the raciness of love scenes, it's impossible to control basic elements such as whether an actor is exiting stage left or stage right. Also, each script can be based only around three main actors, and each actor only gets one primary costume. If you want an actor to wear a different costume in certain sequences in the movie, you must change their clothes in each of those individual scenes. The same goes where choosing a custom backdrop for the scenes. And the options for dressing the sets with props are almost impossible to use.

I've restarted the game twice already. The first time I restarted it was because I did so miserably in the strategy portion of the game that my studio spent a century being multi-millions in debt and I only had three tiny sets to film on. The second time I restarted because my brother accidentally saved over my game in the confusing save screen. After that, I was forced to start earning items I had unlocked all over again.

There are several other frustrating elements of the game, such as being unable to change simple mistakes, like an actor being in the wrong costume, during filming or post production but only during the screenwriting process. Also, in the main game, custom scripts will take more time and money to produce, meaning that making movies the way you want to make them will actually hurt you in the RPG strategy element. And the non-custom, auto-written scripts you will have to produce to keep your studios above water are highly repetitive and hardly ever make sense.

The game certainly has its moments. And it definitely is addicting. The first week I owned it I lost sleep trying to come up with strategies to save my studio from financial ruin. But it really isn't worth losing sleep over. And while I'm addicted to it, I can't recommend it to others.


"Quickly lost its luster"
I do not want to worry about hiring janitors, searching for extras, worrying about the landscape of my studio lot, constructing toilets, or any other of the micromanaging chores involved in running a studio. I want to build stars, direct films, and create cinematic masterpieces. There are so many distractions away from the main goal that one barely has time to enjoy the movie making experience. Bad enough I have to spend forever worrying about side projects, but the movie making software itself is flawed limiting what types of flicks I can even make. What could have been. What could have been. When one turns the entertainment industry into a boring exercise then one knows they have failed utterly.

"Feels more Simcity than Sims"
I've been playing this game for about two weeks now, and it is very fun, if stres-inducing. You start the game fairly slowly, but soon your studio takes off and you have lots of things to worry about, and lots of movies to make. I feel while playing it that, while I'm having a blast, I'm probably missing a lot of customization that more expert players can take advantage of. The graphics are amazing. You can zoom in extremely close and still see fluid movement (granted I have a new computer, it's only a Dell and doesn't' have lude amounts of processing or anything). The stars are relatively easy to keep happy--just keep the most important's salaries high and give them a makeover every couple "years" so they can keep up with the day's fashion. The movies are short but sweet; it's cool that you can see the difference between when your stars/director/crew is prepared or not. I haven't won an award at the award show yet, but I don't really care. This is the kind of game you can get really obsessive about, or you can play it casually for twenty minutes at a time and think it's great.