I want to be a Director

The Movies is a simulation game that allows you to run your own movie studio. You decide everything from what buildings to put on your lot, what sets to buy, what actors and directors to hire, what movies to shoot, when to release them, its all up to you. After a certain level in the game (which comes fairly quickly) you can even take a detailed hand in screenwriting and direction of your movie.

Your Studio Name your film studio to start! Set up a front office for hiring stage crew, talent hall for hiring actors, directors and extras, sets for horror films, sci fi epics, romances, or westerns. You even decide, similar to the SIMs every bit of path and landscaping that appears on your studio lot. The buildings are very detailed and look like something you would see out in Hollywood. They have a set look, however, and you do not get to choose the look of the building. As the game advances from 1928 to present times, the look of the buildings doesn't change either, only newer buildings and newer sets are continually unlocked. Without some proper planning, your lot will be a confusing mess. Once a building is up, I discovered after playing for some time that there is a way to move it or take it down. You have to assign one of the movie lot workers to do that. Just don't demolish a set if a shoot is scheduled there! Placing buildings is as easy as click, mouse drag, and place. Left button click and drag to spin a building or object. Eventually, you can unlock research facilities to make better movies, rehab centers for your stars to recover, plastic surgery centers, deluxe trailers, elaborate PR facilities, post production facilities and best of all the custom script facility. (more on that later).

Staffing your Studio Either create a star in a separate section of the game (sort of like creating a SIM, or any fighter, wrestler, etc. in games that allow you to customize and create characters). You get to give him or her attributes, but not too much of anything, or he or she will have no good attributes in other areas. After that, you literally pick up the job applicant and drop him onto the room within the various building that represents the job you want them to do. There are buildings and rooms for your stage crew, maintenance men, actors, directors, extras, script writers, and researchers.

Making Movies ONE To start, or throughout the game if you choose, making movies isn't very hands on. You assign someone or a team to write a script in one of the available genres; horror, action, sci-fi, romance and comedy. Alas, no drama is available. Next cast the film with actors, a director and extras if needed. Once everyones rehearsed, drop it into the "Shoot it room" and the everyone goes to the sets on your lot to shoot the movie. If everything goes well, eventually its finished, and you just have to pick up the finished movie and hit release. Next, blurbs appear to tell you what everyone thought of your movie and how it has affected all of your rising stars. Later in the game, you even get to decide how much of a budget to spend on public relations and advertising a film's release.

Star Maintenance As in real movies, stars all have their egos and addictions, and you have a degree of control over that. You set salaries, but don't pay too much or the other stars at your studio will get jealous. You can hire assistants to your stars, buy them a nice trailer by the set, give them makeovers, make sure they remain stress free, but not bored, get them to practice, put them in situations so that they socialize, forcibly pick them up from the bar and put them on the set, or if necessary put them in rehab. A mouse click will help you to see how your star is in any particular area.

Making Movies TWO This is where the game really gets interesting. Once you have unlocked and purchased the custom script office, you literally storyboard the whole movie in as much detail as you choose. You set the number of scenes, choose the scenes (from a plethora of pre set sorts of scenes), choose the sets (again there are lots of basic sets customizable with backdrops and props), choose the costumes, choose the number of actors and extras in a scene. You can even add subtitles so that your audience will understand your actors native SIMlish language. Not only is The Movies a fairly fun game, its also a storyboarding tool that you could probably actually use to storyboard a movie idea. However, although there are hundreds of preset scene set ups to choose from, the game doesn't allow you to custom create a scene of your own if its not included. The scenes are categorized by types (i.e. fight scene, romance, conversation etc.) to help choose what you want. In the post production phase, you get to add in music, and edit. I've only started playing this fairly addictive game, so I haven't gotten into it too much to see the extent of things you can do, but you do get to save your movies, and you can export them to let your friends watch them too. So do you want to do a horror film with a nice close up of the killer's eyes? Romance with two lovers on the beach, pan the beach and then zoom in? A sci fi epic on that new alien landscape set you just had built? You can do it in The Movies

Game Play Game play is not that difficult to learn, topics are introduced one at a time, and there are tutorials for each aspect of the game. However, if you are the sort that expects gratification within the first five minutes or you will get bored, this isn't the game for you, it does take some time to learn and to get going. Sometimes I felt that the menus were not particularly intuitive, and I would have liked a simple screen to take a quick look at all my actors and their particular attributes rather than clicking each one, one at a time. Menu bubbles often were hidden under other menu bubbles which got to be frustrating. The lack of being able to move things around a bit on your lot can be annoying, so plan carefully to start. Some parts are fun, sometimes the micromanagement aspects can get a little boring. I for one, was not a fan of making my stars happy and keeping them off the sauce, it got a little boring. Then I found that you can set an option to keep your stars relatively stable. (There are also options you can start with to keep buildings in good repairs, set the money you want to start with, the year you want to start, and how much assistance you want to start.) A few times in the game I was told that my lot was unattractive. I had to take time out from turning out my series of low budget horror films to put trees and flower beds around the lot to pretty things up a bit. I think some things could have been done easier. When you want to write a movie, you have to click through your cast, find the scriptwriters, and then drag them onto the room for the genre script you want. Why not just click on that room to call the scriptwriters in? Oh well, it's a petty grievance, but the game is full of minor little things that could have been made smoother and more intuitive. However, once you get going, its actually pretty fun! My first time playing (without going into the advanced movie making, which I've just now started), I found that it was easier to have a bad horror script, rush it through shooting and make lots of money than to try to shoot a well done romance film. It is a game that, the more you learn, the more fun it will be.

The advanced movie making mode is a bit daunting at first, but nothing you can't get the hang of. It is time consuming, especially once you get into it, but it doesn't take any time out of your game clock, so direct and choreograph to your heart's content. Until I can take a summer off and go to New York Film Academy, The Movies is the next best thing.

Graphics The graphic are very good, this is a PC game, but on occasion, there are slow downs, and temporary freezes. Sometimes characters are able to put their arms through props and some other typical graphical errors, but not so much that it takes away from game play. You can also set up the graphic depth. I had one big complaint however. In selecting the graphics, you can choose among various screen resolutions there was no setting for folks like me with a widescreen monitor, the game assumes everyone has the standard 4:3 monitors. And this is a game about movies! usually shot in .... WIDESCREEN sigh, so I either had to set my monitor to only use the center two thirds or have actors slightly fat.

Sound The sound isn't as cool as I would have suspected in this game, in the movies themselves you will find the most variety of background music typical of each theme. However during shooting, the shouts of cut, that's a wrap and clapping gets boring. The announcer, who lets you know the news is supposed to be funny, but really isn't. For example he tells us of a war in southeast Asia that we will go in and win very quickly and easily. I found the button in options that lets you shut him up since he has no effect at all on game play.

My computer Unlike an X-Box game or PS-2 game, you can't just pop the game in and expect it to play if it was made for that system. Your computers speed, video card and unknown variables will have an affect. I play this game on an HP with an AMD chip thats 2.08 GHz. It has 512 megs of RAM, and a Nividia Geoforce 4 MX Graphics card with 64 megs of DDRAM shared video memory.

Computer Requirements The game recommends 3D hardware accelerator card, DirectX compatible, Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP., a Pentium III 800 MHz, 256 megs Ram, 8X CD ROM drive, and 2.4 free gigabytes of harddrive. With my set up, I only had the problem with the lack of the best screen setting, and the occasional slow down or temporary freeze. Overall, I was able to play the game in an enjoyable fashion with my system.

Set up The game comes on three discs, you load them all in, and the latest version of Windows Media 10, if you don't have it, and you are ready to play. It took about 8 minutes to load all three discs.

Summary Its slow to get started, it takes a while to get moving, and some things could have been made a lot easier, but once you get into it, its a fun to play addictive game with quite a surprising level of detail. I can't give it five stars, but this game is certainly above average, and for a wanna be director like myself, it's a solid four stars.