Product: The Movies Price: $270 Pros: Well-built tutorial and advanced artificial intelligence Cons: No customisation on how cast and crew interact with each other in movie-making scenarios
Step aside, Steven Spielberg. Watch your back, Quentin Tarantino. See you at Cannes, Wong Kar-wai.
Would-be filmmakers can let their imagination run wild when playing The Movies, a personal computer simulation game published by Activision and developed by British firm Lionhead Studios.
The Movies allows gamers to become the ultimate Hollywood player by building and running their own studio. Many of the things people have ever read or heard about Hollywood are also in the game, from stars having affairs and hitting the bottle to teams of genius filmmakers creating the box office hit of the year.
Movie mogul, talent spotter or film director - a player can be one or all three in The Movies. It also offers more than 30 hours of continuous game play.
In Story Mode, players get to establish a studio, manage its resources, invest in research and development and maximise box-office success by making movies for the masses.
Players can make a wide variety of movies such as crime dramas, psychological thrillers, musicals, spaghetti westerns, science fiction cliff-hangers and black comedies. That task is supported by more than 7,000 scenes, thousands of movie characters, 45 sets and countless costume combinations in the game.
