Ah, film.
The Movies asks the player to make pure kino, and boy does it provide. Probably one of the better business tycoons ever made due to the sheer wealth of creativity it gives you to mess around with. It's amazing to me that we still haven't seen a similar game like this, aside from a demo that I've heard isn't nearly as stellar. The devs of this new game seem to be beating around the bush that their version will be lacking the Custom Script Editing that makes The Movies stand out in all of its mechanics, which sucks to hear. The Movies is a game that celebrates goofing off, experimenting, and being creative; a universe that exists in stark contrast to the money grubbing Hollywood we're dealing with today.
And in a tycoon stand point, everything is mostly streamlined to an interesting degree, without boring the player. While you watch your films being made, you can drag and drop those pesky freeloaders to the places they need to be to speed up more of the processes. And while you have several movies being made at a time, there's other offices constantly keeping busy with scriptwriters, with crew and extras running amok; genuinely highlighting the fact that a film is made from the hard work of hundreds of individuals even if only 1 - 5 people are listed in the intro credits. The campaign plops your studio in the 1920's and challenges the player with navigating the brutality of BUSINESS, as real world events determine genre popularity and technological advancements. It's just the details and overall research of the game that makes it oh so saucy. The last year of the campaign fittingly landing on 2005, the year that this game was released.
After getting my hands on it probably 15 years after the last time I played it, it felt like opening a Christmas gift. The insanity I unleashed upon this game, it didn't even know what had hit it. There is a sandbox mode that I recommend for the people coming into it wanting to mostly make goofy movies, but I settled for a campaign playthrough this time knowing it'd eventually have "an end" at some point. Here I realized what it must feel like to be a triple A game studio, spending a million dollars making a movie only to recoup $250,000 in returns. Suffering for my art.
The campaign is fun, but it also showcased a bit of the gripes I had for the management systems in this game. While you start out in the 1920's with little technology, etc. you are sort of left on rails for the most part. It's when you hit around the 1970's, everything just goes batshit insane. It takes some concentration to be able to manage several actors/directors, scriptwriters, and crew. While you're filming two movies, your actors have their own moods to keep in check. If they're upset at just about anything, it'll be harder to keep them working and your film's rating will suffer because of it. It's an aspect of the game that I genuinely like, but if mismanaged it could be detrimental. It seems there is a strategy behind setting up your campaign for success, as I didn't hire enough directors in my first initial hiring process. This was devastating as my one director became overstressed and quit, which led me to being BONED. Every once in a while you'll be thrust into an award ceremony where the results give the winners some OP bonuses, like making your stars basically unbothered for a short period of time, to giving them better experience gains. It's a rich gets richer scheme!! While my competitors swept the awards ceremonies, it became impossible for me to keep up. My studio was unfortunately and devastatingly mid at best. While I ended up finishing the whole campaign in 2005, we still ended it with -$500,000 in debt LOL. Welcome to Hollywood, baybee. Enjoy your newfound homelessness!
My main gripes with the game is that it can become a bit overwhelming to manage so many different units at once, but it is automatic for the most part. It only becomes an issue when you're understaffed, which is sort of typical. Since awards can launch your studio into the spotlight, you're less likely to acquire new employees if you're failing. It seems like after a certain point, the game just stops giving you potential hires for things like crew and maintenance, which meant that I had to pull from other departments to temporarily have an extra or crew member available. There's a deceptively evil fast forward mechanic, similar a la The Sims, that seems to only speed up the timeline of events and loss of money, rather than speeding up the actual employees who are working. The announcer lady would announce that a new person was in line to become an actor, but I'd go to the stage school and see no one there. Either she is a lying sack of shit or she announces it much too late every time. Either way, the shortage of staff is a quick way to bottleneck yourself into SUFFERING. The game gave me an Asian stuntwoman and then literally nothing else. So, I kept getting these funny reviews where the critics kept noticing how the stuntpeople never resembled the lead roles, who were mostly white men. It's a system with awesome rewards for your hard work and abysmal misery for failing, sometimes for things outside of your control. If there was a more frequent dispense of new employees in about every office, it would have easily mitigated all of those issues.
Which is why I recommend the sandbox mode for those wanting to dip a toe into this game for the first time, where your creativity can be displayed front and center. There isn’t a risk of getting a game over in this mode and offers a much more casual experience. The custom movie maker built into this game is fantastic for its time, with the ability to change weather, backdrops, costumes, and camera angles depending on the sets you’ve built on your lot. The list of poses and scenes you can work with is surprisingly expansive, especially with the Stunts and Effects pack installed, and it’s genuinely a fun time whether you’re taking the art of filmmaking seriously or not. That being said, it's a process that can be a bit time consuming and I wish there was a better way to make sure the actors and costumes stayed the same throughout the film. You’re given tools to make scripts automatically through the use of Screenwriters, who will write movies for you instead, but those screenwriters are smoking absolute crack cocaine. They’ll write movies that you wish you had the talent to make. Keep in mind though, that you could make the most incoherent movie ever and it will succeed solely based on the experience your lead characters in it have. It’s just fun to make dumb movies sometimes and I wish we could have a more modern version of this so badly. I want to start a new campaign fixing where I messed up in the previous one already. I need to know what it’s like to be #1, crushing the competition. PLEASE.
It’s more than a game. It’s CINEMA!
The Movies asks the player to make pure kino, and boy does it provide. Probably one of the better business tycoons ever made due to the sheer wealth of creativity it gives you to mess around with. It's amazing to me that we still haven't seen a similar game like this, aside from a demo that I've heard isn't nearly as stellar. The devs of this new game seem to be beating around the bush that their version will be lacking the Custom Script Editing that makes The Movies stand out in all of its mechanics, which sucks to hear. The Movies is a game that celebrates goofing off, experimenting, and being creative; a universe that exists in stark contrast to the money grubbing Hollywood we're dealing with today.
And in a tycoon stand point, everything is mostly streamlined to an interesting degree, without boring the player. While you watch your films being made, you can drag and drop those pesky freeloaders to the places they need to be to speed up more of the processes. And while you have several movies being made at a time, there's other offices constantly keeping busy with scriptwriters, with crew and extras running amok; genuinely highlighting the fact that a film is made from the hard work of hundreds of individuals even if only 1 - 5 people are listed in the intro credits. The campaign plops your studio in the 1920's and challenges the player with navigating the brutality of BUSINESS, as real world events determine genre popularity and technological advancements. It's just the details and overall research of the game that makes it oh so saucy. The last year of the campaign fittingly landing on 2005, the year that this game was released.
After getting my hands on it probably 15 years after the last time I played it, it felt like opening a Christmas gift. The insanity I unleashed upon this game, it didn't even know what had hit it. There is a sandbox mode that I recommend for the people coming into it wanting to mostly make goofy movies, but I settled for a campaign playthrough this time knowing it'd eventually have "an end" at some point. Here I realized what it must feel like to be a triple A game studio, spending a million dollars making a movie only to recoup $250,000 in returns. Suffering for my art.
The campaign is fun, but it also showcased a bit of the gripes I had for the management systems in this game. While you start out in the 1920's with little technology, etc. you are sort of left on rails for the most part. It's when you hit around the 1970's, everything just goes batshit insane. It takes some concentration to be able to manage several actors/directors, scriptwriters, and crew. While you're filming two movies, your actors have their own moods to keep in check. If they're upset at just about anything, it'll be harder to keep them working and your film's rating will suffer because of it. It's an aspect of the game that I genuinely like, but if mismanaged it could be detrimental. It seems there is a strategy behind setting up your campaign for success, as I didn't hire enough directors in my first initial hiring process. This was devastating as my one director became overstressed and quit, which led me to being BONED. Every once in a while you'll be thrust into an award ceremony where the results give the winners some OP bonuses, like making your stars basically unbothered for a short period of time, to giving them better experience gains. It's a rich gets richer scheme!! While my competitors swept the awards ceremonies, it became impossible for me to keep up. My studio was unfortunately and devastatingly mid at best. While I ended up finishing the whole campaign in 2005, we still ended it with -$500,000 in debt LOL. Welcome to Hollywood, baybee. Enjoy your newfound homelessness!
My main gripes with the game is that it can become a bit overwhelming to manage so many different units at once, but it is automatic for the most part. It only becomes an issue when you're understaffed, which is sort of typical. Since awards can launch your studio into the spotlight, you're less likely to acquire new employees if you're failing. It seems like after a certain point, the game just stops giving you potential hires for things like crew and maintenance, which meant that I had to pull from other departments to temporarily have an extra or crew member available. There's a deceptively evil fast forward mechanic, similar a la The Sims, that seems to only speed up the timeline of events and loss of money, rather than speeding up the actual employees who are working. The announcer lady would announce that a new person was in line to become an actor, but I'd go to the stage school and see no one there. Either she is a lying sack of shit or she announces it much too late every time. Either way, the shortage of staff is a quick way to bottleneck yourself into SUFFERING. The game gave me an Asian stuntwoman and then literally nothing else. So, I kept getting these funny reviews where the critics kept noticing how the stuntpeople never resembled the lead roles, who were mostly white men. It's a system with awesome rewards for your hard work and abysmal misery for failing, sometimes for things outside of your control. If there was a more frequent dispense of new employees in about every office, it would have easily mitigated all of those issues.
Which is why I recommend the sandbox mode for those wanting to dip a toe into this game for the first time, where your creativity can be displayed front and center. There isn’t a risk of getting a game over in this mode and offers a much more casual experience. The custom movie maker built into this game is fantastic for its time, with the ability to change weather, backdrops, costumes, and camera angles depending on the sets you’ve built on your lot. The list of poses and scenes you can work with is surprisingly expansive, especially with the Stunts and Effects pack installed, and it’s genuinely a fun time whether you’re taking the art of filmmaking seriously or not. That being said, it's a process that can be a bit time consuming and I wish there was a better way to make sure the actors and costumes stayed the same throughout the film. You’re given tools to make scripts automatically through the use of Screenwriters, who will write movies for you instead, but those screenwriters are smoking absolute crack cocaine. They’ll write movies that you wish you had the talent to make. Keep in mind though, that you could make the most incoherent movie ever and it will succeed solely based on the experience your lead characters in it have. It’s just fun to make dumb movies sometimes and I wish we could have a more modern version of this so badly. I want to start a new campaign fixing where I messed up in the previous one already. I need to know what it’s like to be #1, crushing the competition. PLEASE.
It’s more than a game. It’s CINEMA!