The Movies Preview

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play a game that spans a century of years? Well, if you haven’t it doesn’t matter. In Lionhead Studio’s The Movies, that is exactly what you’re able to do. From the years 1910 until the futuristic 2010, you will take your studio through whatever the ruthless movie industry has to throw at you. You must survive amongst your competitors or you will indeed fail. You have to learn your stuff quickly in order to succeed. But what also drives the concept to make this game even more appealing is that you have the chance to do a lot of “firsts” in the industry. Whether that may involve the technology you use to produce your movie (i.e. color picture) or what you actually have happen in your movie can be your first to do (i.e. first passionate scene).

When it comes time for you to start your whole business, there are three main objectives for you to accomplish. The first is creating your studio, next is getting your movie talent and the last is the actual making of your movie. You will have to focus on all three of those areas as equally as possible to get the most out of your experience, but it may not be as daunting as it sounds. Not everyone who may play this game will be exactly interested in handling all the economic aspects of the business. Lionhead Studios is hoping that non-gamers actually choose to try this game out as they think it can appeal to all audiences. There will be a lot of auto-management options for players to choose from if they don’t wish to carry on the economic burdens of creating their movies. However, some players will actually wish to control all the economic aspects themselves. In this regard, you will always have four advisors at your side willing to give you the advice you may need to capitalize on your resources.

Your first task, building your studio, consists of actually building your lot from the ground up and placing all the buildings you will be using. There will be a good number of buildings available at your disposal, and each will provide a different service. For example, a research lab will give you access to brand new costumes, sets and scenes. You also have two options dealing with how you allocate your investment capital. One is completely dumping all your funds into one resource to a fast and quality advancement in one area. That is a very risky but potentially rewarding endeavor. Or, you can distribute your money evenly to allow your studio to run as effectively as possible on all fronts.

In terms of how you actually make your movie, the process is rather extensive, but hardly insurmountable. In reality, it’s virtually identical to how the process is gone through in Hollywood. To begin the making of your movie, you will first need a set. You will want to choose one that is hopefully suitable for the genre that you are producing. So far we’ve seen sets such as a very well-lit and elaborate library to one with a full beach environment. Of course, your traditional dining and living rooms are a part of your repertoire, as just about all movies use those these days. Your sets are also fully customizable in terms of color and prop use. Oh, and when we say customizable, we mean it. You could have the most out-of-place props in your crazy mind aiding the shooting of a scene (but of course it wouldn’t help you much in the end).

Once you choose your set, you need some scenes to shoot. In a very jaw dropping number, there is a massive list of over 2000 selectable scenes to shoot in the production of your movie. Also with your scenes are plenty of subcategories that you can choose from. You should hardly ever find yourself hard pressed to find a scene that will cater to your likings. So what’ll it be, a passionate making out scene, or how about an all-out brawl? The choice is obviously yours, but make sure it’s the best one in accordance to what the public audience may want in the current time period. Some scenes happen to be specific to certain sets, but that still shouldn’t take away the variety of scenes that you’ll want and probably need when making your movie. Artist dummies will be present when you begin your initial shooting before your actual actors replace them.

Then for how you actually shoot your movie, it is done through the use of sliders. These sliders also correspond to the type of scene you are about to shoot. So depending on how extreme you have your sliders set will determine how intense your scenes actually turn out to be. So obviously if you are shooting a fight scene and have the slider set on extreme, you’re asking for some pretty loaded violence. So you actually have to be careful with this. If you don’t have a reasonable amount of action depending on what you’re shooting, you are asking for trouble. You don’t want the scene to be too extreme or too underdone or you’re not going to do well. If the public notices you overdid your scenes, you won’t get sales. If people aren’t impressed with the underdevelopment of your presentation, you aren’t getting your money back.