I have many fond memories of 3D Movie Maker. With classic blockbuster films such as "Space Baby", "Space Bay Returns", and "Giant Space Baby versus Bongo", I and my friends were at the top of our local geek circle when it came to doing cool things with our then-top-of-the-line computers. Of course that was a really long time ago, and the days of impressing people with out crazy movie-making antics are long since over.

..Or are they? Quickly following up on the slightly disappointing release of Black and White 2, Lionhead Studios has also wrapped up development on The Movies, an interesting and distressingly addictively title that takes a player from the dawn of film development in the 1920’s all the way up to modern times. Thanks to the detail and level of micromanagement involved, the game could be aptly described in a number of ways, but I prefer recognizing it as "Theme Park meets 3D Movie Maker" – because from an almost literal standpoint, that is almost exactly what this game is. To help settle me into the game, there was a basic tutorial feature offered separate from the "New Game" option, through which I learned all the simple elements of hiring staff members and putting buildings up. However, given how effortlessly I blew through it, it should be noted that this tutorial is primarily meant for players new to this type of game (the "type" of course being that of a large-scale movie lot management simulator, where buildings are placed, crew is hired, and experienced actors kept happy through facilities and incentives), and any seasoned gamers can jump right into the New Game option to start up their movie studio.

And of course there is quite a process players must go through before they can open up their studio for action. After picking a studio name and logo, players are sent off to their own lot. Armed with nothing more than a small office for hiring meager construction peasants and janitors, players must build recruiting facilities to hire actors, directors, camera crews, and other essential personnel, flora and assorted amenities to help spruce up their lots, and of course the sets where the actual magic happens. This segment of the game is where the "Theme Park" comparison comes in, as players must oversee their entire lot in a real-time manner, managing financing, construction, maintenance, and of course the individual staffing. Basic grunts can be effectively hired and left alone to maintain a player’s studio and keep it shiny with no additional micromanagement needed on behalf of the player, but much more care must be put into selecting actors and directors. Unemployed actors are actually in something of a limited supply, as while a good deal of prospecting cast members may show up once your studio initially opens (which you must then pick up and "drop" over the relevant "Actor", "Director", or "Extra" positions inside of the relevant recruitment building to hire them for that role), this amount will quickly dry up once a player’s studio starts gaining pace, and the most direct way to attract more employee interest is to raise a studio’s rating, or become so stupidly popular that actors from other studios start flocking to you in droves.

Actor management is one part where The Movies gets a bit complicated, however. Unlike the basic grunts, actors have a huge barrage of statistics that will ultimately affect their performance in whatever movie they play. Actors will constantly be concerned about their "image" (which can be fixed up by giving them a makeover), work-related stress, physique, their relationships with other actors or directors, and even start complaining later on if they don’t get their own trailers or personal entourage. In fact, actors and directors have so many stats to keep track of that, from a personal standpoint, I recommend hiring only three or four (of both actors and directors) from the onset of the game until you can settle into the basic mechanics first, as otherwise the sheer amount of micro- and time-management required to keep everyone happy will most likely drive you insane. Poor initial design and over-staffing is something that actually prompted me to start over again after a couple of days of playing, just so I could use my firmer knowledge to lay out a better studio and set up better relationships. Here’s a tip for starting players: Hire on two actors, and two directors, then set one of each aside to work specifically together. This way, the relevant directors and actors will each get much more experience (and be happier working together) when making specific movies, and can ultimately churn out better films to help your fledgling studio get started.

And in fact, the whole genre system is where the game up-shifts from being a simple studio management game into an actual interactive movie creator. Players have two approaches for creating movies – they can either hire overpaid, drunken scriptwriters to mass-produce some cheap scripts (the early scripts are even dropped off to your doorstep free of charge) that don’t really resemble any kind of coherent movie up until the 1940’s, or they can go in buy a special scriptwriting shack to create their own blockbuster masterpiece. I imagine most 3D Movie Maker veterans will be interested in how this specific element works and how far they can take their custom movies, so at the risk of letting you guys down a little hard, expect to be "slightly" disappointed. I’m putting emphasis on the word "slightly", because the movie making system really is quite versatile – just not nearly as versatile as I was originally expecting (such as, say, the ability to create a fifty foot space baby that flies through mountains leaving a trail of cheesy polygonal explosions in his wake). Movies are actually created by choosing which "set" you wish to use for a given scene (such as a bank, war-torn battlefield, spooky forest, etc), and then selecting the "scene" itself – which is where I realized that my ability to truly customize scripts was distressingly limited. Selecting a "scene" basically places down a pre-scripted event, where the actor’s positions, animations, and even the camera angles are all pre-selected.

Understanding that this description may seem a bit unclear, I’ll elaborate with an example. Let’s say I select the basic "sci-fi" set (which is a bare-bones space ship interior), and then choose the "Alien Chase" scene. The game will then automatically lay down actor positions for a man getting chased by aliens, with all of the camera angles and animations pre-selected and effectively unchangeable. Players can use slider-bars to modify the context of the animations to some extent (i.e. modify what expression specific actors should have, or how violent an attack animation may be), but that’s about it – there’s no way to actually modify the pathfinding information for the animations or customize how the actors interact with each other outside of the pre-assigned variables for each "scene". This in turn kinda sucks, as players will quickly note that it can be difficult to piece together drastically different scenes (one example would be having a "sneak up behind this actor" scene, followed up by a sudden "kung fu fight" scene – the combat scene has the actors in a completely different location than the previous one, and this can’t be changed, so it looks very odd). This aside, creative players will still find ways to put together stunning movies with great storylines and lots of action, it’s just that the confines for making these movies is irritatingly limiting.

This helps me segue nicely into a brief comment of the graphics engine however (I’ll go into more detail afterwards), as I believe part of the reason on why the actor manipulation is so limited is because players can physically watch each and every scene from the game world as it is being constructed and actors play out your script. Every animation and maneuver will match exactly what you see in the movie (you can even double-click the director’s camera to jump in and modify certain settings on the fly as the movie is being recorded), and this adds a cool level of immersion and realism to the game, since everything occurs in real time from start to finish for a movie’s production and you are granted the opportunity to see how the movies are being made step by step. Unfortunately, even this seems somewhat limiting – an actor’s performance in a movie is supposed to be affected by a wide number of variables, but all of these seem calculated from a purely technical standpoint. While I didn’t go out of my way to try and get an actor on the verge of being a converted Postal Worker onto my sets, I found that stressed out actors ultimately fared no differently from a visual standpoint than those of super-happy, overqualified ones. What I would’ve preferred to see is little "bloopers" or snafus during production that can occur as part of an incompetent crew or incapable actors, but if this kind of detail is actually included, I haven’t seen it yet. Perhaps it was removed to help avoid unexpected movie-production delays offsetting the game’s difficulty?

Speaking of game difficulty, once I mastered the basic trick of setting up good Actor/Director relationships and keeping my tenants happy, The Movies turned into a surprisingly easy game. I soon had all kinds of cheesy movies put out which, supplemented by the occasional year-to-develop masterpiece, turned me into a millionaire and escalated me to the top of the sales charts. Each movie, actor, and studio is subject to constant criticism and reviews from the press (making my current job seem slightly awkward), with award ceremonies coming up on occasion to deliver special bonuses and gifts to the highest-ranking studios. While I didn’t exactly dominate every other competitor, I found staying on top of these competitions to be quite easy providing I managed my actors well and kept putting out a lot of decent titles (over-hiring my research staff to put me on the technology edge helped too), and I imagine any player worth his salt will have no problem with attaining a capitalist victory and keeping their movie crew happy, meaning that ultimately The Movies is just a cool, fun, challenging sandbox where aspiring movie directors can make a whole bunch of wacky films to unleash upon their virtual world. I feel there could be more to the process of making movies and interacting with competing studios – specifically, some manner of integral multiplayer support beyond a basic online service for trading movies would have been fantastic.

Still, this game’s leading bonus is in the simple fact that it is addictive as crack. Playing this game resurrected the concept that the human body really does not require any extended form of sleep or downtime, and so long as I indulged in a healthy diet of The Movies every day, I would be certain to maintain a measure of productivity. Even after playing the game for weeks on end, the novelty only began to wear off after I had openly exploited nearly every feature and quirk the game had. Since more technology, options, and events are unlocked as the time-line advances, players will always have plenty to do on their first run through the game, and this helps keep the experience fun and invigorating. Adding the appeal of a dedicated "Sandbox" mode (and the personal fun I had of going back to start a new campaign to see if I could make a better start with all of my experience) was also a great move, and many types of players will find something of value out of the experience offered through The Movies.

As a closing comment regarding graphics and sound, The Movies offers a surprisingly scalable experience. Even on the family’s limited P3/800mhz with 512MB of SDRAM and a Radeon 9600 Pro (which I subjected the system to purely for experimentation purposes) the game was surprisingly playable, though of course no match for my own 1.8GHZ machine with a gig of RAM. Sadly, to this end the game is actually quite memory hungry, and I found that trying to "drag and drop" entities (such as a script onto the "release" option, or an actor into a specific studio) offered erratic reliability at best because the game kept pausing to swap out textures or cram new data into memory as other activities occurred in the background. At least with the game’s sound, the designers really couldn’t have gone wrong – there are appropriate UI-related sound effects, some soothing background tunes, and even a radio announcer that runs in the background (with an actor that changes accordingly as players advance through the years).. Naturally players can also use a variety of music tracks for their films (even custom ones) alongside a selection of sound effects, though there isn’t much in the way of verbal communication – the game takes an "incoherent mumbling" approach similar to The Sims to handle this, except that The Sims did it better.