The Movies Demo

[RainOfTerror]

Build your own movie studio and make films to capture the world’s imagination. Start filming in the break-neck 1920s and rewrite history as you pioneer the great cinematic advances. Be the first to introduce talkies, color, animation or computer-generated special effects. Pick the scripts you want to shoot, design and construct the sets and hire the director, the crew and the stars.

Activision has released a playable demo for Lionhead's movie studio sim, The Movies, allowing you to try out a thorough tutorial and the start of the full game, as you begin building your movie studio.

You can grab The Movies demo (http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=31643) (285mb) over at WorthPlaying.

Editor's Note: Thanks to Zanzibar for the submission as well.

[torrefaction]

I love this game.

[Sl1pstream]

Finally, now I can check if my laptop runs this.

[Citizen Philip]

I bought this game 3 weeks ago. I haven't opened it. Should I?

[Magnanimous Gnome]

Finally, now I can check if my laptop runs this.


My laptop won't run anything released after 2004. I guess I shouldn't expect my laptop to be able to run the latest and greatest, but it'd be nice if I could play them even on very low graphics settings. The bottleneck for me is the videocard - 16 measly megs of RAM. :(

[Citizen Philip]

My laptop won't run anything released after 2004. I guess I shouldn't expect my laptop to be able to run the latest and greatest, but it'd be nice if I could play them even on very low graphics settings. The bottleneck for me is the videocard - 16 measly megs of RAM. :(

Gaming laptops are a myth.

[Varsity]

There's a good speed download here (http://www.strategyinformer.com/pc/themovies/demo/3452.html).

[torrefaction]

Yeah man. It's a lot of fun. I haven't been able to play too much, but I got a big kick out of the game.

[Sl1pstream]

I'll be picking this one up at work tomorrow :)

[Magnanimous Gnome]

Gaming laptops are a myth.


Yeah, I know. I don't have my desktop anymore (sold it to my mother so I wouldn't have to haul it up north), so my laptop is my only option. It can run Morrowind just fine, but it can't run Civ 4 at all - the game won't even load. Does that make sense?

[Steele Johnson]

It's a typical Peter Molyneux game: sounds innovative on paper but always turns out to be your average micro-managment strategy game.

I played it for weeks and I had built a pretty good studio that was making some decent money. It's just that it gets old like any other micro-managment based game. Build, keep your workers happy, clean the areas, feed your actors and directors ("we need more food"), let them take a decent shit, hire them, fire them, keep your script writers busy, release movies, etc. Rinse repeat.

I was personally let down by the fact that you get no extra credit for taking the time to make a movie yourself using the movie editor. It's really just an option. A gimmick that has no advantage.

The only thing I do with it now is create short flicks to ammuse my friends. But even the movie editor is rather limited. Other than that, I'll probably never play the movie studio portion of it ever again.

Keep in mind that my comments are coming from someone who's not a big fan of strategy games. I've lost interest in that genre ever since they stopped making games like Battlezone and Sacrifice.

[Dorfl]

(I) sold it to my mother

Interesting family you have there. I can just picture her making you sign a check before she breastfeeds you.

[Suicidal ShiZuru]

About time they release a demo.

[TKO]

I bought this game 3 weeks ago. I haven't opened it. Should I?
IMHO: Hell yes! It's a damn fun game. Now, I haven't played any previous Peter Molyneux games, so if there's a formula thrashed to death already I'm not aware of it. But it's a cool studio-management game and movie-maker rolled into one. Oh, and those radio DJs: They are rockstar-good, oh yeah.

Granted, it can come down to being a micro-management game if you choose to play it that way, but many of the management bits can be ignored, or turned off in the sandbox mode, and the game still plays well. eg: you don't have to do your own scripts, just leave it to the script-writers, or take the middle ground and just tweak the stuff they bring out to make it better-rated. ..The separation of the tycoon and movie-making aspects is nice. Just concentrate on the bit that appeals. (that's what I did.)

The game can be a damn time-sink though, be warned. ..Unfortunately I have given up on it now. Much later on in the game I'm finding bugs and crashes that are killing hours of work .. a shame, coz I really wanted to get into this one. (anyone else find dragging someone to costume-changes can crash it?)

[Varsity]

Hey, that wasn't bad at all.

[superherotaco]

Interesting family you have there. I can just picture her making you sign a check before she breastfeeds you.

You joke, but that shit is tax deductable.

[Steele Johnson]

Much later on in the game I'm finding bugs and crashes that are killing hours of work .. a shame, coz I really wanted to get into this one. (anyone else find dragging someone to costume-changes can crash it?)

Yes, I've come across that bug a few times, but it doesn't kill hours of work. The game has auto-save that works seamlessly in the background, so you're not going to lose much at all.

[TKO]

Yes, I've come across that bug a few times, but it doesn't kill hours of work. The game has auto-save that works seamlessly in the background, so you're not going to lose much at all.
But the auto-saves only happen in the movie-tycoon part of the game, not script-building. The things that made me give up were:
1) freeze the clock, and start laying out grass, ornaments, and trees, so I'll win the pretty-studio award when the awards kick in in two-minutes game-time ..the crash there happened 5 minutes after resuming gameplay, nearly an hour after entering the pause-mode. (Then I discover the auto-saves only happen after 30 minutes of *unfrozen* game-time. grrrrr...)
2) start a custom-script (I've taken to doing a manual save just before I enter these) ..a few costume-changes are involved (since most extras appear in totally inappropriate clothes), and the crash happens on damn near the *last* costume change in my only moderately-elaborate script. That's one to two hours work gone. ..happened twice that day. :mad:
3) given my propensity for paranoid saving now, I happened to do a save relatively soon after completing one of these scripts, rehearsing it, and starting the filming. ..I come back to the game in the afternoon, reload, and what are my crew/stars/director doing? ..wandering away from the set now. the script is gone .. just frickin' gone. I spent a long time writing the damn thing and now it doesn't exist. I can write another, and lose less than a minute game-time, but another hour or more of *my* time is required to get back to where I was. ..by this stage these experiences have kinda beat all the 'fun' out of me.

Don't get me wrong. I love the game (not pirated, and 1.1 patched.) It's the spontaneous 1 to 2 hour snippets I might lose that keep me away. ..maybe it's more reliable on the console. *sigh* ..apologies for the rant. :o

[Magnanimous Gnome]

Interesting family you have there. I can just picture her making you sign a check before she breastfeeds you.

What? I don't get it. :confused: