So what is the game about? At the heart of it, it's about making movies. It's part Roller Coaster Tycoon, part The Sims, and part Adobe Premiere all rolled into one complete package. It takes on the Tycoon aspect with you building up your studio, maintaining it, and creating movies to make more money as well as earn awards and prestige for your studio. It's like The Sims where you have to monitor your stars and directors to make sure they're happy, have good relationships with each other, and to ensure they don't get into trouble. You can even steal other actors from other studios if you play your cards right, as well as lose your own actors if you don't treat them well. The game is also like Adobe Premiere in the sense that you can create your own scripts and edit them together with your own audio to explore your own creativity as you create your own movie. Your goal is to be the very best studio as compared to the competition, win awards, and unlock new items by researching and earning them.

You begin with an empty studio lot in the 1920s during the dawn of the movie industry. Movies will start out as silent films done in black and white. You start off with placing the essential buildings throughout your studio, including a Stage School, Casting Office, Crew Facility, Stage Set, and Production Office. To create these buildings, you will have to hire builders who will work on the lot to build your studio as you expand it. A Stage School allows you to hire directors, actors and extras, where a casting office will let you take a script and add the necessary people needed in order to film your movie. This will also let you set the current state of the movie production from rehearsal to actual production. A Crew Facility lets you hire and fire the various crews that will work on the lot. A Stage Set, as you can guess is the actual stage where the movie will be filmed on. Finally a Production Office monitors the financial state of the movie, keeps track of which movies have been released, which movies are in your vault, and the current reviews of your movies and studio lot.

Creating your first movie is as simple as taking a script to the Casting Office, placing your director and as many actors as the script requires, adding the number of crew needed to help film the movie, and when its all done, setting the production to release. It really couldn't be much easier to get your first movie going in the game. Eventually, you will have a script office where you will hire writers and develop the genre of the scripts that you want. As these things go on, your actors will develop relationships with each other, and the director as well as anyone who works on the movie will gain experience in their respective roles on the movie.

Movie ratings are based off of numerous factors such as the Stars' relationship with each other, how unique the sets are, and the experience of the crew which fills up the technical merit of the movie. Then there is how well the public has received it based off the star power, how much interest there is for the genre, if there is a novelty value and the technology involved. This may sound like it would be easy to make great movies all the time, but you'll find that it'll be a challenge in the beginning to get that full five star rating. These ratings and reviews also give you feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the people working for you and the status of your studio.

If all this sounds a bit overwhelming to you, don't worry, there is an excellent tutorial and a good piece of advice is don't try to expand too fast despite how much money you see in front of you. Being able to keep up with what you have can become a bit tricky if you add too much at once. Even after this, if you feel like you don't want to worry about certain things, you can choose to play the Sandbox mode instead of the main game. This lets you set specific parameters such as movies getting made instantly, not needing to worry about the relationships of the actors and directors, what period you start out in, how much money you have, and more. However, certain items won't be available in the Sandbox until you've unlocked them from the main game.

After all this talk about the game, we haven't even touched upon the script maker which allows you to essentially create your own movies. You can select from quite a few different types of scenes and place them in certain settings. Some settings have various unique types of scenes that take advantage of the actual set location. You can continue to add shots until you feel like you have enough for your movie. Once that is done, you can go in and set the camera position for the scene, add in your own voice dialog, dress up the set, and more to change how the scene will look and act. You can even edit around your movie once you have things laid out. While there is quite a bit of variation, you are still limited to the sequences given so taking some time to experiment and understand how certain scenes work will be needed to fine tune your final movie. Once you've created your movie, you can output it to an AVI format to share with other people as well as host on the official site. Creating movies is simple to pick up and get going, but to do a well made movie it will take some time and good creativity.

The graphics in the game are nicely done with the ability to zoom the camera in to the people so you can see them interacting with each other, and your movies being created as if you were there. While you can change the looks of how your actors and directors look, they don't age realistically over time unfortunately. I once hired a 19 year old director and he already had grey hair and was balding. One thing to be careful of is that even though the game may run well at first on lower end computers, as you start to build up your studio, it can bring the game to a crawl. With very few options to work with to help scale the graphic quality, there isn't much you can do to help performance either.

There are a few areas that hold the game back from being perfect though. There seems to be a lack of availability when it comes to trying to hire people for your studio. Initially there will be a few people out there, but once you hire them all, it's hard to attract more to your studio. Ideally, by bringing up the prestige of your studio, it will attract more people to want to work there. However, that's easier said than done and if you expand fast, you'll find yourself in a bind trying to meet all the demands of even simply having people around maintaining the studio like janitors and builders. You would think it wouldn't be hard to hire those, but it's too easy to have a shortage. The same goes with crew, extras, script writers and other areas.

Another area that falls a bit short is trying to keep up with maintaining your stars and their relationships with each other. It can be a pretty daunting task when you begin to expand out and have several actors at your disposal. Keeping up with all of their needs can be quite hectic especially when that's not the only thing you are worrying about if you're trying to do everything right. In the beginning with just a few stars it wasn't so bad, but by the time you're a few decades in with several actors at your disposal, you'll feel like you're doing a lot of micro-managing instead of looking at the big picture.

There are of course other minor flaws here and there when you think about how real movies are made compared to what you are allowed to do here. For example, since the movie ratings are based off an algorithm, you can't have that unexpected breakthrough surprise hit that nobody would have guessed would have been popular. You also typically can't have really bad movies do well and vice versa. But with everything that is going on in the game, it's a bit unrealistic to expect it to be completely realistic.

With a lot of good PC games out this holiday season, there's one thing that The Movies has going for it that none of the other major games have; it has mass appeal. A lot of the games for the PC are for core gamers, while this is something that can reach out to people of all ages and both guys and girls. The inclusion of the ability for people to make their own movies will surely spark a number of creative movies with endless possibilities, especially with the potential of future additional downloadable content. I personally can't wait to see the creative juices at work out there to see what people come up with. You can bet there will be a great community of people sharing ideas and doing things that nobody ever thought of. It's great to see after the delays that such a bold game has turned out so well. Despite some of the flaws, The Movies is really addicting with enough challenge for those who want to be the best, and enough fun for those who simply want to play around with it.