The Movies: Premiere Edition (PC Games, 2005)

No doubt about it, you must have heard of this game sometime and trust me, everything they say about it is true. It was designed by Peter Molyneux himself and, what a great concept. You make movies.

At first, it seems like the best thing ever and it really is. You start off with a blank studio and you hire janitors, builders, crew members, actors, directors, scientists, and more at your will. The whole beauty of it is how it starts in the early 20's and watching the technology evolve as the time progresses is impressive. You go from no sound and color, to color, then sound, the special effects, to cgi, and so on! The main meat of the game is the story in where you compete against other studios for awards and every five years, an awards ceremony is held where you can win awards which unlock things such as paying your actors half their salary without them noticing.

There is a management part to the game aswell as a moviemaking part. You could spend the entire game just managing the lot and vice versa. It is true that as you get bigger and hire more actors/directors, the management part gets overly tedious and the game slows down tremendously due to the amount of things going on in the game all at once. Graphically, it is not very impressive but definitely not subpar. Imagine the Sims 1.5, not 1 or 2, but somewhere in between for the graphics. I got the special limited edition which gives you a hint book, a DVD, has extra music, trailers, and what not, a star creator, and a little more. Frankly, you might aswell get the regular version since the hint book is common sense, the music tracks are nothing you will die missing, and the star creator can be downloaded from any good site. It is fun to create yourself though and then making your own script.

Although it may seem fun to make movies, it truly is hard to make something worth watching and you can either make your own movies or hire script writers to write the movies for you and they gain experience each time. The second part of the game is the Sandbox mode and it is recommended to play this after beating the main part, so as to get everything unlocked. This eliminates the the problems of the regular game such as worrying about your actor's moods, buildings deteriorating, and so on. You can focus on just making movies.

You can add your own music and even do your own voiceover which lip synch with the actors quite impressively. Then you can upload these movies to the Movies website to get rated and the highest scoring movies earn your credits to download extra content. Not bad.

This is a good game but in the long run, it may become tedious and repetitive. There are multiple ways to play and in the end, it definitely is something worth checking out.