The Movies [PC]

We've all thought, while watching the latest creation of Uwe Boll, "I know I could do a better job than this". Here's your chance to prove it: The Movies lets you run your own movie studio, write, film, and voice your own movies, and release them to an unsuspecting -- and hopefully adoring -- public. Outstandingly good as a tool for creating movies, it's not so good in the traditional gameplay stakes, but we can't mark down a game with such enormous potential for entertainment.

The Movies comes in two parts. The first you'll meet is a Tycoon -style management game which sees you managing the development and finance of a movie studio, hiring and firing stars, building movie sets and administrative buildings, and making sure your fastidious stars are satisfied. If you've played any of the popular Theme Park or Rollercoaster Tycoon games, you'll have little trouble getting to grips with it

Part two, and the more original and interesting by far, is the game's set of tools for creating your own movies. After choosing a genre, you can string together scenes chosen from a vast list of templates -- a fight, a close-up on an actor's face, a zooming establishing shot -- then choose the set, weather, lighting, backdrop, camera effects, actors, costumes, props, and tweak the exact behavior of everything to your heart's content.

String together a few of these scenes and your script is ready. Most movies run 1-3 minutes, but there's nothing stopping you making yours as long as you please. Then you cast the movie, choosing its stars, director, extras, and crew, and hit the button when you're ready to start shooting. If all that rigmarole of writing your own script doesn't appeal, you can hire your own sweatshop of scribblers to churn out blockbusters 24/7.

Then, if you're playing in the later eras, you'll be wanting to gear up the PR and marketing machine, sending off your stars to interviews and pimping your creation to stir up interest. Once the movie has finished shooting you can tweak it in post-production, show it to movie critics for feedback, and when you're happy with it, send it out into the world for the consumption of your adoring fans.

Thanks to a modified Black & White 2 engine, your movie studio is lifelike and convincing. The sets show particularly outstanding imagination and art, but even incidental buildings like trailers or restaurants look convincing. Your stars visibly age over time, and if you check one of them in for a little cosmetic surgery, they'll be appropriately... enhanced when they come out.

Your movies are shot using this same engine. It's a testament to the quality of the graphics that the close-up shots look as good as the main top-down view of your lot. Shame that your actors don't look quite as lifelike as they could (we couldn't help imagining how the game would look with Half-Life 2 levels of facial detail), but on the whole they're convincing and move well. They're only voiced with Sims -like mumbling, but all you need to fix that is a microphone and a little acting talent.