The Movies

Lionhead’s "The Movies" game has caused huge anticipation over the year or two that it has been announced. It’s almost certain to be a simulation hit that will run similarly to the popular PC title Roller Coaster Tycoon. Assuming you are a motion picture owner with a plot of land and money, you begin to explore the movie universe, expanding your riches as you go. You can buy all sorts of things to make your movies better, such as sets, lighting, props and more. There are lots more things to buy, people to hire and movie ideas to be discovered. War of the Worlds 2 anyone? No, how about Dumb and Dumberer….ER!

You hire cast and crew members by pressing the "A" button when the cursor is on their figures as they pass through your lot. Like someone's attitude, see the next Tom Cruise or maybe a Julia Roberts look-alike? Wheel them in and start hiring. People you hire have their own personality traits. Some of your crew doesn’t like doing certain things, perhaps cleaning the toilets or picking up garbage, for example. Some of your high-class actors might have an odd tendency of wanting to beat up the coffee guy. Along for his dislike for coffee, he might only like to do romance films. As a result, if you try to put him in movies that aren’t romance then you’ll be paying big money for someone that isn’t fueled with incentive to do a good acting job on movies in that genre.

To be a good entrepreneur and a master in the film business, you’ll have to pay attention to your hired professionals' needs and wants. Depending on their personality, some actors are high maintenance and require things done quicker, food from only the Old Spaghetti Factory or perhaps an odd fetish for making servants dance. They'll want more pay, bigger trailers, the hottest girls--you know, all that good stuff actors get. Special washrooms and a cafeteria is also a given for top-notch actors, the list just keeps going.

If an actor is becoming uncooperative, you can send him to the clinic to sign him up for anger management programs, sexual addiction therapy and emotional realignment classes. Heck, if you wanted to you could just send a sick actor there to get checked up on. The most high-maintenance thing about actors would have to be their self confidence, as someone might want his nose a little smaller because it sticks out too much in a kissing scene. Well, what an actor wants an actor will get, and you’ll have to send him down to a plastic surgeon. The plastic surgery option runs pretty much like creating a character in a wrestling game or something similar to that, except more realistic.

As your actors are walking across your lot, say from their trailers to the washroom, dollar signs will drift away from their heads, signifying you’re paying them. The faster the money drifts away, the better or more expensive your actor is, and the more you'll begin to hate his paid trips to the washroom. Yup, it’s all about the stars in this game. You can even place their trailers away from where the paparazzi usually hang out so they can have some privacy.

Remember the sexual addiction therapy? It’s easy to pick out which ones need it; just look outside around 9:00PM and see an actor sneak in a groupie from the paparazzi. Along with that, he might want some shots of whiskey to help that drinking habit or a couple pizzas delivered a day for his overeating. You can suspend an actor if you feel you need to until he gets his priorities straight. Make sure not to exclude a good actor though, because it’ll make him or her mad, and might sway him into quitting. Often rival sets will try to coax your star actors into joining their set and leaving yours. Don’t worry though, as quick as they steal your actors you can steal them right back by offering some extra cash and a nice piece of chicken waiting in their reserved trailers.

Actor relationships are not the only type of relationships you have in The Movies though. Occasionally people will call you up offering you money to make a movie on a certain script, cast a person as a lead actor, et cetera. If you accept these proposals, you might make a new friend that might help you later on in the road or offer you another proposal with a bigger, fatter paycheck if you abide to it.

Yes, the features just keep a’ coming. If you’re stuck with anything, you can call up your favorite buddies down in the advisors business. They’ll help you out when it comes to studio work and tough, money-related decisions.

Getting into the specifics, there are three different view modes that take effect in The Movies. The normal view works like Roller Coaster Tycoon, giving you the opportunity to view your cast cleaning up the lot, and the lazy one off in the corner eating that you were considering firing. Show you’re the boss by pressing A and telling each cast or crew member what to do. The blue dialog box will tell you the specific actions you can make that particular person take. The next view is the movie-making view, which is the view that you are in while in the making of a movie. The last view is the actual cut-scenes that are displayed in so many of the screenshots, which is for when you're looking over an already created movie.

Sets are probably the most important key to making a film look real. Make sure to make different sets for every movie you create, and put a fair amount of money into them to make them look realistic. Haven’t you ever said to yourself, "Hey, that place looks familiar," or , "Hey, I see the camera man through the mirror" in the middle of a movie? Yeah, nobody likes shabby sets. Whether it’s a desert, computer lab, the prairies or whatever, just make sure it’s realistic--and specific to your plot. Once you’ve made your set, you’ll have to choose how many and which actors will play in it, and what costumes they’ll be wearing. After those two things are done and--assuming you already have your script--you choose the genre of the movie. (Your options include romance, action, horror, comedy, et cetera.) They give you two different bars for each genre, and you use them to control how dramatic the scene is. The more dramatic, the more it sells; and the more it sells, the richer you are--the richer you are, the happier you are!

If your movie is a hit, you can even make it into VHS’s and DVD’s, providing you’re in a time period that has them. Also, you can make individual films into series. If you make a series and the first movie of it was good, the anticipation of future installments will go way up, which increases their sales.

The Playstation 2 and Xbox versions of this game will be online, and the PC version allows you to exchange movies you’ve made in the game with other people through the Internet. Nothing extra has been announced for this game on the GameCube, but it looks like its coming together great, online or not.