The good buildings

Until you unlock the Custom Scriptwriting Office and Post Production building in the game, you will be seriously disappointed if you were expecting to experience being a great director crafting pieces like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Jaws. Until those two facilities appear, you are more likely to feel like a Spielberg, walking the lot of of his DreamWorks studio with a broom and dustbin cleaning up after Tom Cruise.

Once those two buildings are unlocked though and you have researched the movie-making technology out to 2010, you can spend most of your time in the games Sandbox mode where you can dial up the money you start out with and disable the more tedious parts of the game like building decay, and star tantrums. Now your free to fully appreciate the power of the built-in movie creation and editing system. You can add custom music tracks, select different scenes, props, and behavior templates. You can even record your own dialogue over the existing gibberish and then have the game's engine sync the actors lip movements to your provided dialogue! The only real negative in the custom movie making aspect of the game is that now matter how much time you spend crafting your movies, it appears to have little or no effect on the awards the game gives out periodically. What that means is that nearly every time it goes up for the game's equivalent of an Oscar, it’s the madness of 1999 all over again with Shakespeare in Love taking Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan, or in the case of my last game, the engine-created action film called "Delver & Fudge" (no joke) from another studio beating out my labor of love, a comedic space opera called "Zero? Gees!"

The A.I.'s lack of taste aside, most gamers who haven't learned programs like 3D Studio Max and Maya, should find The Movies' creation tools fascinating. They provide a freedom and creativity that is unexpected after wading through the early portions of the "single player campaign" portion of the game. And if the micromanagement and the canned films of the tycoon portion of the game are the single player campaign, then the custom film making capabilities are the title's online multiplayer - in a very literal sense. Having chosen to delay this review until a number of weeks after the game's release date, we have had some time to assess the games longevity, not just from the perspective of hours to completion or replayability, but in terms of community and developer support. Both Activision and Lionhead Studios seem prepared to continue to support the product. They have just recently released the first pieces of bonus content, available from the online prop shop. Currently there isn't too much beyond a picket fence, stagecoach, a Santa suit, a few new hairstyles, and a couple dogs. But more is on the way and it is all only accessible by way of a currency earned through posting your movies online and having them viewed by others in the community. It is a well thought out system that should encourage the community to keep producing new films for a long time to come.