Well now that I’ve gotten my New Years Resolutions out of the way, I’ve moved on to getting a good start on at least one of them…actually buying games again. I don’t know if I can really use this as proof that I’m really doing it though, as I bought a PC game, and it’s not like I can rent those anyway.
The game is “The Movies”, and to be honest my first impression of the game wasn’t all that hot. The “Tycoon” games this one descends from have never really been my cup of tea, and having to actually get a movie studio up and running doesn’t really excite me, so it took me a little while to warm up to the game. That all changed though once I got into making the actual movies.
The movie making process isn’t quite as easy and intuitive as I had hoped, it’s a lot more like using set pieces in different orders. You can manipulate things a little bit, but not as much as I would have liked. Keep in mind that I’ve been playing this for two days now, so next week may be a totally different story. Where the game really shines is in the post production of your movies. I’ve used Adobe Premier and things of that nature, and the video editing in the game is far easier. Of course Premier goes much farther, but for things like moving sound effects around etc, the guys at Lionhead have really done a great job at movie editing software. So much so that I’m willing to put the effort into using the less than ideal movie making features of the game to do it. Happily I don’t have to really play the empire building portion of the game, as they’ve included a Sand Box option that lets you start off with 1960s tech and huge sums of money to spend as you like.
I wound up giving the game a second chance and I’m happy I did, so this is what I’m trying to say. Sometimes games will dissappoint at first. They may rub you the wrong way, the game may not actually be worthy of the hype. That doesn’t mean a game isn’t worth playing or sinking your teeth into. Sometimes you just have to work at it. And that’s the Cannon.