Ah, Hollywood! The Glitz! The Glamour! The repetitive clicking and dragging! Veteran game designer Peter Molyneux has teamed up with Activision to publish a game that lampoons the history of the movie industry, and casts you as the head of a huge Hollywood studio. The Movies has you building sets, managing actors, maintaining your lot, and releasing blockbusters. But more than that, it actually allows you to "film" your own pictures, using tiny 3D actors and even a mini editing studio where you can layer in your own soundtrack and voiceovers. Afterwards you can export you cinematic creations to a standard video format and share them with friends.

Give it up for the idea: it's brilliant. Just a few years ago a game like this wouldn't have been possible. You'd have been stuck with a Hollywood tycoon game and nothing more. Besides, everyone loves movies. There's an instant appeal with The Movies that makes you immediately want to pick it up and play. We wish more publishers would take risks on ambitious ideas like this one.

Build your own movie studio!

That said, The Movies doesn't quite deliver on its potential. As a game, it quickly boils down to mindless micromanagement, with your ambitious studio plans reigned in by artificial constraints. As a movie-creator, the tools at your disposal are buggy and somewhat limited. Taken together, however, there's definitely some entertainment in here. The Movies is more fun as a toy to tinker with than a "game": despite its limitations and problems, it's still exciting to see what people are going to come up with while using it.

Lights! Camera! Mouse Cursor!

Here's how it works: like most tycoon games, you start off with an empty lot and a pile of cash. It's up to you to turn this unassuming Southern Californian plot of ground into a bustling, glittering movie studio. First, you hire actors (for their good looks) and directors (presumably for their ugliness). You'll also need extras, maintenance crews, film crews, and eventually writers. You'll decide where to construct the various buildings you need and how to connect them with walkways so that your studio is efficient. Meanwhile, adorning your grounds with various fancy decorations allows you to personalize your lot while keeping your studio's attractiveness rating high.

Actually filming a movie requires you to take a script and then assign a cast and crew to it in one of your buildings. Once you've built the necessary sets you can set them loose. If all goes well, they take care of filming the picture themselves (you can watch the actors play out their parts on the actual set), and when it's done you release the movie and rake in tons of cash. The Movies is pretty friendly (or realistic, depending on how you look at it) in that even a crappy movie will probably earn your studio some moolah. When a movie is done, you can actually watch the finished product: the actors mumble nonsense lines, but act everything out.