"Alright Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close up"

The Movies was highly anticipated when the concept was introduced. It was ingenious on paper. Being a movie mogul and making real interactive movies. It had the potential to be the next Sims or Roller Coaster Tycoon. When I bought the game, I had my expectations high, expecting it to be the next simulation classic.

Until I played the game...

The Movies is by no means a bad game, but it suffers from many glitches, primarily in how the game is played. Running a studio in this game was more tedious than fun. You build a group of buildings and start hiring writers, actors, and crew. Once you hire the writers to write a draft, you begin to shoot the script. You hire the actors and crew members. And then production begins. After the film is finished, the film is ready to be released. Then, the process repeats again. Here lies the first problem, as a head honcho you have no control over the production qualities. This means that the finished product looks like complete garbage. Some of the films last only ten seconds and NOTHING happens. Secondly, this process gets tedious after ten minutes. Unlike The Sims, where there were multiple duties involved. Here, the only thing that the player does is assign the cast and crew to jobs and painstakingly watch the process, which motivates the player to make one’s own movies.

The movie making process is a lot more fun and the ability to customize the scenes, costumes, camera angles, and scenes. The end product can be outstanding, unlike the movies created on auto-pilot. Once the film is finished, it becomes a draft and as an executive, you can cast the film. However, this became a glitch. Because the homemade movies required multiple scenes and had a longer running time, they took longer to make. And like The Sims, when the cast and crew are overworked, they become depressed. And the film takes nearly three years in game mode to complete. As a result, your studio earnings dwindle and you don’t win any awards.

Both scenarios are flawed no matter how you spin them.