The Movies [PC]

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There is nothing like The Movies. It's evident from the way Activision's production coordinator, Daryl Heffernan, tries to get through a demo and barely has time to take a breath. This is one of those games where there's so much content all tied together, and all built for a variety of different audiences and play styles, that's it's hard to show off one feature without having to reference nearly every other feature. It comes across as a paradox: a sprawling and tightly integrated game.

Like Hollywood itself, the three main facets of The Movies are the stars, the studio, and the actual movies, all of which are intimately intertwined but very different from each other. The stars play like a Sims-style personality sandbox, the studio management plays like a typical tycoon strategy game, and the movies themselves are part of a sophisticated and/or simple editing program that makes it easy to create and share short animated movies.

Your stars can be created from scratch using the Starmaker (available now through certain pre-order deals in case you want to get started on your own personal talent pool), which has all the usual tools for customizing a character model. But you also have to set your star's stats, which include things like the genre they do best, how physically fit they are, their addictions, and so forth.

"People will undoubtedly make real world actors," says Heffernan. "Of course when it comes to our online community site, we'll have to police that." But the clear implication is that you can play with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, introducing Katie Holmes into the mix if you want.

In the game, stars wander around your movie studio like sims. They'll avail themselves of whatever facilities you have and interact with each other (you can even try to manage their relationships by pairing them up and seeing if they stick, as it were; relationships make for good onscreen chemistry). If stars are bored, or stressed from working too much, they're prone to giving in to their addictions. You can keep them occupied by buying private trailers where they'll live, dropping objects in the trailer's radius like coke machines, basketball courts, or even fancy cars. Be careful, however, that you don't make your less pampered stars jealous.

Over time ( The Movies spans a period of about one hundred years), stars will age and eventually retire. You can drop them into a cosmetic surgery building to forestall the effects of time with a nip/tuck, implants, or a bit of liposuction. But the bottom line is that even the best stars have a shelf life, so you'll want to get them working while you can.

And here's where the studio management starts to come into play. Making a movie involves creating a script and then moving it across various facilities. But you have to build those facilities first. A game starts out on an empty lot in the 1920s. You have to add buildings like casting offices, production offices, publicity departments, and specific kinds of movie sets. You lay down sidewalks to connect them and landscaping to beautify it (after all, your lot's prestige is one measure of your success in the game). At this point, The Movies looks very much like a typical tycoon game.

As time advances along a timeline across the top of the screen, there are marks every several years representing awards shows. These serve as minigoals, since your performance at each show determines what new content is unlocked for you. These can range from perks, like an improved mood for all your stars, to crucial new facilities you can build. As time advances, new technologies will come along as well: sound, color film, pyrotechnics, dollies, cranes, and so on. The numbers of tools available will increase as you play.