Thursday, November 10, 2005

Kim's review of The Movies

There are plenty of detailed reviews out there, so I'll keep this short:

It's really two apps in one: A tycoon game with a"movie mogul" setting; and a consumer-level machinima tool. You can play the game without really caring about your movies (you actually arent required to view them if you don't want to). You can *kind of* use the machinima side of it without playing the game. However, you do need to know how the UI works, and certain 'eras' of film making are only unlocked after playing.

  • As a tycoon game, it's first rate. I'm not personally a fan of games that require too much micromanagement, something most of this genre is guilty of. However, that being said, the tutorials, user-interface, and interactivity are an absolute triumph. I'm REALLY impressed.
  • As a machinima tool, it seems REALLY powerful. Despite that, it's very easy to use. After playing the game part for 2 hrs, I went back, did the 'sandbox' mode to unlock a bunch of stuff, and created a 4 minute vignette subtitled film in about 15 minutes and was quite impressed with the results. (note, I didn't even view the tutorials for this part, so was lucky to find out that you need to build a post-production facility if you want to add audio or subtitle, and that is also where you export to WMV.

I'm running it on a beta of Windows Vista, and had no bugs or crashes, though the ingame movie viewer was running a little choppy.

9 on 10 for The Movies. My only complaints are too much micromanagement (typical for this genre), and the problems I had with the speed of the ingame movie player. Otherwise, I loved it!

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