Alan Smithee says 'Enough is fucking enough'.
By Koworld
"The Movies is exactly like building a film studio and making films. Exactly. In every way. Except the parts in which it's much more like building a Theme Park. Except those parts. Which is fucking all of them."
That's my copy there - you can have it for nothing. I'm glad to pay the postage to get it away from me. Fuck it, I'll even slip a fiver in there to take away your pain (and believe me buying a half-bottle of Netto-brand blended Gin and pouring it into your eyes will seem much the more attractive alternative to loading The Movies a second time). I mean it - The Movies plus a fiver is yours for nothing. First person to make a convincing post here explaining why you want to suffer this appallingly excuse of a game can have it.
...
And that's where I was going to leave this review but having thought it through I realise that I owe you at least some explanation. And bear in mind as you read on, although we get a trickle of freebies here at Rodent Towers, this is a game I was so keen to play that I paid £20 of my own money to get it (hmm, hang on, discounted by £15 within a few weeks of release - what's that all about?) Bear in mind too that I completely 'get' and utterly love these games, Populous, Championship Manager, Theme Park, SIM City, Transport Tycoon - I've happily lost months of my life to quite prosaic past-times. I find them soothing and reliable and fun.
So what the fuck went wrong? Right from the start it's clear that there is a structural problem. The Movies is two separate exercises in crass mediocrity hideously clumsily welded together: on the one hand it is an internet-freebie-standard management game, and on the other it's a phenomenally clunky movie construction kit. What we were promised sounded fantastic: a completely sandbox movie-making simulation. The reality of what's been delivered is typical modern Peter Molyneux: too much going on, too much ambition with the result that corners are cut at every single stage which then utterly prevents the branching individuality of a truly great god, or management, game: the same things happen over-and-over-and-over again and not only is there nothing you can do to change that, worse the things repeating now are all things we've played before. Years before. Fuck-off should I be building litter bins and burger bars and hiring janitors - what the hell do these things have to do with film making? Even Championship Manager eventually had the good grace to accept that doing training and that was boring and let you hire a dogsbody to do it for you - in The Movies every last frigging irritating detail demands your absolute and immediate attention. Always. Maybe if there was a little bit of variety in consequence that might help but it's all so stultifyingly THE SAME.
No litter bins close to that burger cart. There will be trouble. Even if there isn't, somebody will whinge like a scalded bitch about something else in a second. And then something else, and then two things at once, and then the same thing from earlier and, and, and...
Powerful Movie Editor? I think that's what the box promises but I've sealed the envelope now and I can't check. Whatever it's sold as, the reality is a powerful idea appallingly badly executed. You can make your own films but unless you are a masochist of the very darkest sort you simply will not find the heart to penetrate beneath the surface of the Fisher Price interface and have a proper go at things. Lose the pointless game element and Lionhead could have developed the movie-making component, with it's elaborate sets, range of virtual actors and array of special effects options, into something powerful and compelling. Do that on it's own and we might well have been blessed with an addictive new hobby - virtual movie making.
What galls is that The Movies is the way it is because one man cares more for his 'vision' than he does for delivering fun or engagement or character. The Movies is bland, boring and irredeemably pointless.
February 2006
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