Do you love movies? Well, I do! I love movies, and I think they’re great to watch. I also love acting, and directing is fun, too. But would you ever want to run the studio? Feral Interactive has brought us The Movies, where you create and run your own movie studio, starting back in the 1920’s when movies where first invented. This sounded like fun at first, and it was in the beginning, but I found that it drags down after a while, especially if you produce flops. Of course the point is to not produce flops, but once you produce a few losers, it’s difficult to recover. Also, you have to take care of the stars and watch what they do, while you are busy doing something else, like keeping your finances in order, or making sure that the writers are meeting deadlines on scripts. This game was hard for me, even on easy mode. The graphics are beautiful, even on systems that meet the minimum system requirements, you can upload your movies to the Internet and share them with the world, you can dub your own soundtrack to your films using iTunes, and in Sandbox Mode you can make your own movies without competition. All these aspects are fun, but when the final credits roll, this game needs a little more character development to get a 100 percent positive review from me, but I still think it's pretty nifty. Compared to other SIM type games, which pull you in more and more as time and game play progress, I found myself less excited in the later levels. Still, it’s encouraging to see Feral Interactive back in the game with other titles, such as Colin McRae Rally and Lego Star Wars II. In order to play, you’ll need 1.6 GHz on your processor, your Mac has to be running 10.4, and you need 4 GB of space on your hard disk. It's Universal Binary for Intel Mac compatibility. 



Thomas Fogel, Posted 9/09/2007

For more information on The Movies, visit: www.feralinteractive.com