Showtime! will allow you to control and build your very own movie studio from the ground up! As a newcomer to Tinseltown it will be your job to create movies your audiences want to see as well as develop new technology to stay relevant in the film industry.
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I have put an unreasonable amount of time into this game because, although I fucking hate it, I have to admit that it's a fun little time-waster.
But seriously: this thing STINKS. It has got to be one of the laziest tycoon games I've ever played, hands-down. This plays more like an early-era, jank-fest DOS game than anything coming close to a competent or exciting studio management sim. It's so mindless that you could recreate the same experience with a piece of paper and a pair of dice. The only difference between the two is that you don't get the same nightmare-inducing character models if you decide to pass on the "proper" version of this """game.""" Occasionally, I'll say things like "that looks like it came out twenty years ago," and it'll be a hyperbolic statement. But in the case of Showtime!, the character models honestly look like they came out of a PS1 cutscene.
And none of this is to mention the fact that it's super easy to break any semblance of balance here. The game comes with a neat little editing tool for you to modify and create new actresses, actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, you name it. But the tool is so barebones that nothing is stopping you from creating a person in any one of those categories that is the literal embodiment of perfection and then making it so it costs next-to-nothing to use that person in-game.
Again, as a piece of mindless indulgence, this isn't actually that bad. As a video game, though? Play The Movies instead. It's a hundred times better and has a lot more substance.
But seriously: this thing STINKS. It has got to be one of the laziest tycoon games I've ever played, hands-down. This plays more like an early-era, jank-fest DOS game than anything coming close to a competent or exciting studio management sim. It's so mindless that you could recreate the same experience with a piece of paper and a pair of dice. The only difference between the two is that you don't get the same nightmare-inducing character models if you decide to pass on the "proper" version of this """game.""" Occasionally, I'll say things like "that looks like it came out twenty years ago," and it'll be a hyperbolic statement. But in the case of Showtime!, the character models honestly look like they came out of a PS1 cutscene.
And none of this is to mention the fact that it's super easy to break any semblance of balance here. The game comes with a neat little editing tool for you to modify and create new actresses, actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, you name it. But the tool is so barebones that nothing is stopping you from creating a person in any one of those categories that is the literal embodiment of perfection and then making it so it costs next-to-nothing to use that person in-game.
Again, as a piece of mindless indulgence, this isn't actually that bad. As a video game, though? Play The Movies instead. It's a hundred times better and has a lot more substance.