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Great Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 21, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Despite what I've read in many other reviews for this item, I think The Movies is a great game. I don't really have any bugs or problems that really ruin the game, but yes there are a few very very minor things.

The game mode is awesome, and I'm not frusturated or having any trouble doing anything. If you're a frequent gamer, it's not hard to figure out the tools and even if you're not there are instructions with it. Yes, you have to unlock certain things, but that's the fun of the game. I'm not having any financial problems and I'm the number one studio and have the numebr one ranked star (this stuff changes pretty often though). It just takes some thinking and strategy.

Creating your own movies does take a while and is kind of annoying, so I don't really do that, and if you get the stunts expansion back everything is twenty times better (the moviemaking and the regular gameplay). If you like building games such as Sim Theme Park, SimCity, Roller Coaster Tycoon, you know, building games like that, you'll love The Movies. It's a really fun, entertaining game that keeps you busy for a while.

I tried....really.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: March 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

You will WANT to like this game but I don't know about any of the rest of you I found a number of things very frustrating

1. The tutorial is a waste of time and you have to find out a lot stuff on your own and I don't have the patience. For instance you are given the ability to add sound to your movies and then no instruction on how to make them appropriate for the context of the film. You are given the ability to slice scenes together and given no test audience to find out how a particular combo will work. A lot of this is trial and error that is all I am going to say.

2. Lots of detail but details about the wrong things that I feel are unimportant. Do I really need to have my grade constantly bought down because the paths connecting my building don't all link up? Do I really need to know that my actor or actress is "off to squeeze one out?" I can always take comfort in the fact that my studio may produce crappy movies..but it has really clean restrooms.

3. I don't care that you're feeling bad and had to stop at the bar on your way to the set make the movie for god's sake!! This happens constantly even when you think your doing a good job of keeping your stars happy.

Overall-I'm not saying its necessarily a bad game because its not the radio dj's are hilarious and there is a lot of detail but its not something you can play casually and just have fun there are to many details that hold you back. If you REALLY want an in-depth game you can try this and maybe you can make some sense out of it. I'm just giving you my impression.

Incredible game with Endless fun and movie idea's.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 29, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The Movies is a fun and interesting "Sim" game. If you have ever seen a movie and said "I can do that" but never had the money or actuall means to do so the I have news for you!! NOW YOU CAN !! this game is ahead of its time and I recomend that you buy the expansion pack also. Makes for great chase scenes and EXPLOSINS!

If you dont treat your actors right with big Trailers and everything they desire then they may begin a serious downward spiral. They will eat till they are fat or drink till they pass out or even QUIT! I like the fact that you can actually make your OWN "Sim" actor. This game is HOURS of fun!

good game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I love this game when i first got it i wouldn't get off the computer i was rapidly making movies! then i got bored and left it alone for a month or two now im back in and having fun all over again like it's brand new ok now to the review first what i like about the game: I LOVE the sandbox mode pretty much because i can make a movie in a snap! then upload it to the internet and show it to my friends and family! i think i like sandbox mode best :) now why do i give it 4 stars? its because. oh wait ahem whats bad about the game: the lack of employees you can only hire employees if they appear on your studio lot you'd think a multi-million dollar studio would be able to find an extra -_- yes i did steal a joke from a review on youtube but i feel the same way and i dont really care for the "Story Mode" i thought the game was called "The Movies" not "Deal with whiney ungrateful stars" sorry for that overkill joke :D
and now im responding to other reviews: yes sometimes i to am frusterated with the fact that there is no free cam and that all the scenes are pre made but i think unless they made making your own scenes ULTRA ULTRA ULTRA simple i like the fact that the scenes are pre made well most of the time hehe but there is free cam in the expansion pack but the person that complained that there was no free cam well my point is that review was b4 the expansion pack was released. well that wraps it up but one last thing go to www . themoviesgame dot com and visit my studio: rhckids and enjoy my various movies :) goodbye

Room For Improvement

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

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

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: October 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

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

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

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

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: June 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

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

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: May 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

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.

Its said how this master piece is not well known...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: March 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

gameplay:9(superb)
graphics:9(superb)
sound:9(superb)
value:9(superb)
tilt:9(superb)
overall:9.0(superb)
Its sad how this game isnt well known,becuase I know that a lot of people would of like a game where you run a studio make movies and etc... If you are a fan of the sims or tycoons this should be in your good list because over all the sim/tycoon games I games i played, the only game that can stand up to this one is the sims/sims 2 which to me its overall is 9.6(5 stars,very close to perfect which is 10).In the begining you get 2 starter movies then you hire scrip writers to make movies until you get the wanna be cheese something like that challenge conpleted then you can start making your own movies or if you want more micromangment you can continue letting the scrip writers make them.There are over hundreds of scenes,attitude of the chareters,clothing they wear,backdrops and etc...This game has a lot to offer and is very time consuming.If you are a sim fan here is your fun,you hire ators/actresses,and director (and extra but they arnt as inportant as a star) and get then to win awards, build releationships,keep then in good moods,give them makeovers,cosmetic surgry and etc..The graphics on this game are cutting edge,the game offers good soundtracks, sometimes the the radio station is very funning like for example the guy said my wife told me yesterday what about you get a real job,*he laughs* she doesnt cook clean she doesnt do anything all she does is eat candy and talk on the phone with her fat sisters,and if i say the last word this review wouldnt go through but anyways this game is cutting edge and only that one sim/tycoon can stand up to it.Overall this is recomanded to anyone who enjoys the sims or game like mall tycoon 2 or city life and etc...

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