On set for the shooting of Face-Washing Three: The Moisturizer. View Slideshow 
I lived in Los Angeles for a while, and I still visit occasionally. I've always enjoyed my time there, because L.A. is the only city I know where all the generalizations are true. It really is image-obsessed, movie-obsessed, car-obsessed and youth-obsessed. I knew I was someplace bizarre and amusing when a flyer for cosmetic surgery was delivered to my door with the grocery store circulars.
So, of course, Los Angeles is the perfect setting for a sim game. After all, sim games aren't really simulations in the strict sense, except perhaps simulations of a magic world where furniture comes out of the sky like some sort of reverse IKEA rapture. So The Movies – set in an unnamed city where they make movies, decorate with palm trees and assign sycophants to celebrities – is a fictionalized simulation of a real place that simulates fiction while fictionalizing the real world.
The premise is similar to other sim games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. You are God On a Budget, with enormous powers to create and destroy and to influence the lives of tiny fickle people as long as you have the money to do so. In this case your Eden is a movie lot, your Adam and Eve are aspiring actors and directors, your cattle and creeping things are extras and scriptwriters respectively, and the plants are actual plants. And the forbidden fruit ... is cinema. (Note: We cannot be held responsible for attempts to make sense of this extended analogy.)
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Who needs Sundance?
Download Lore Sjberg's two-minute machinima masterpiece The Horserider
The options available in The Movies are staggering, and are, thankfully, introduced incrementally. You start out by recruiting actors, building a couple of basic sets, and making grainy black-and-white films with largely self-sufficient stars.
Then the decades swoop by and you find yourself trying to soothe a diva with a booze addiction who's throwing a fit because you gave one of the other actors a bigger entourage than her while she was off getting plastic surgery. Meanwhile you're trying to goad your R&D department to invent digital sound, tearing down an Old West saloon set to build an alien planet, and sending a script over to the PR department to be hyped.
And if that weren't enough to make you scream for a soy latte, the titular movies aren't just abstract concepts like health points or levels. Each production delivers an actual movie, acted out on your virtual sets by your virtual actors, which you can watch – and even export onto the internet for other, real people to watch.
You're free to get up to your elbows in celluloid in the custom script and post-production facilities, where you can try to turn the Dadaist films the computerized scriptwriters tend to turn out into actual entertainment. This isn't necessary to the game, and in fact much of your meddling doesn't effect the film's in-game success, but it does make machinima remarkably simple.
You can do anything from simply throwing subtitles onto a stock movie, to micromanaging a film: assembling your own scenes, sets, costumes, actors, and then adding voiceovers. Activision and its partner Lionhead Films encourages the uploading and sharing of your creations, so this could be your big chance to show the real-life movie studios what you could do for them, given half a chance!
Heh, not really. Big movie studios don't care. But you could amuse a few college students.
The Movies is a complex game with a remarkably smooth interface. The most relevant information pops up when you select one of your minions, and you can right-click to get the full deal. A wide selection of keyboard shortcuts awaits you. It would be nice if the documentation explained a little more about what each of the buildings does, and it would be nice if you could set the game speed to something other than "regular," "somewhat faster" and "pause," but these are minor quibbles.
The Movies is just as much fun as going to the movies, and much more fun than actually making movies. And by the time you've played for a few hours, you'll really hate reviewers. Stupid reviewers! Who do they think they are?
