The Movies PC game is not only a fun challenge of the tycoon variety but a terrific creative outlet as well.
The positives: A terrific opportunity/medium to create and tell stories. Five genres to pick from: Romance, Comedy, Sci-fi, Action and Horror. The Movies Online provides a platform on which to display your work and to share your movies with others as well as receive ratings - it's also where you can watch others' films and rate them, too. Not enough can be said to describe how great a creative outlet this game can be. Sandbox mode lets you cheat so you don't have to worry so much about actors' moods and studio finances and you can make as long a movie as you want without long shooting schedules.
The negatives: Frustrating for control freaks. Random glitches can ruin gameplay. For example: If a character in previous scenes has red lipstick and blue nail polish on, regardless of the costuming in later scenes -say the character is not supposed to be wearing any make up for whatever reason- then the character will still be wearing the lipstick and nail color they had on before and it can be very hard to change, even in a re-shoot. Filming anything of substance takes a LONG time in-game and a studio can quickly go into debt making one of these films - even if there are other movies being released. Lastly, if you're computer is even a little bit slow, this game can crash at any instant. Mid-scriptwriting, it may crash and everything WILL BE LOST. Autosave apparently doesn't work while putting the scenes together and I'm pretty sure the same goes for post-production.
Minus the glitches and performance problems, The Movies is a terrific game and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who has longed for such a creative outlet.