The Movies Updated Impressions--The Movies Hits Postproduction

Official Movie

Watch a bank robbery gone wrong in this movie made with The Movies.

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Using Hollywood terms, you might say that The Movies is in postproduction at this point. In other words, all the features and content for Activision's and Lionhead's ambitious game about running a movie studio and making your own movies are now finished and in place. However, what the companies are doing now is testing and balancing the game before its scheduled ship in November. We recently got to check out the latest progress on the PC version of the game, and it reinforced our belief that this is one of the biggest and most original games of the year.

The starmarker lets you create incredibly detailed faces, which is perfect for those close-up shots.

The Movies is such a large game that it's hard to describe. Part of it is a simulation/strategy game, where you start as a budding movie mogul in the 1920s and must build your studio lot, research new movie-related technologies, commission scripts, distribute money and resources, hire actors, and make and release movies up to the year 2005. It's also a game that lets you take direct control over the making of a movie, and you can create a script, choose the scenes, cast the movie, select the costumes, shoot the movie, edit it, and mix in your own music, sound effects, and dialogue. You can then take your finished movie and share it with the rest of the world. And while the studio lot of The Movies may remind you a bit of The Sims, especially since tiny people walk around, going to their jobs, you don't exercise direct control over them. Instead, the stars of your studio walk around with wants and needs that you must address in order to keep them happy; but at the same time, you don't want to overindulge them.

In our recent look at the game, the first thing we saw was the new starmarker feature. The starmaker will be offered as a preorder bonus to customers, but it will also be part of the regular game. If you get the starmaker ahead of The Movies, you can get a jump start on creating your own movie star, who will automatically appear in the game once it ships. The starmarker is a bit like the create a Sim feature in The Sims 2, only a lot more powerful. You select a gender for your star and customize their look. The facial customization is incredibly deep, as you can tweak virtually every aspect of their face, to the point of creating mirror likenesses of real people. And while you can't adjust a person's height, you can adjust their weight and their age. Aside from the physical look of your star, you also assign other attributes, such as their genre strengths, which determines whether the star works best doing action, drama, comedy, romance, or something else. Additional attributes will determine your star's mood and stress levels, which will affect how susceptible they are to getting bored or into trouble.

You can direct the intensity of a scene by adjusting the slider.

Once you have created your star, you can switch the view of the studio lot, where you play The Movies from. As the studio mogul, you can determine which buildings to erect on your lot, though there will certainly be a method or pattern to follow. For instance, you'll definitely need facilities for writing, casting, and editing; and, of course, you'll need sound stages for sets. But you can also construct other buildings, such as a restaurant and bar where your cast and crew can eat (there are even VIP areas cordoned off for the stars, or for when you want to treat someone special). You also need to hire everyone who works on the movie lot, from the stars and crew to the janitors, and more. You'll probably want at least four or five stars minimum, but you can have upwards of 30 stars, as well as numerous movies in production, though that will be a lot for you to manage.