As I finished the tutorial, I already had a bad feeling about The Movies. I don’t have time for this, I have lots of stuff to do in real life and I can’t become obsessed in a game again. As I spent the better part of the next few days playing it, like a tweaker on a… whatever it’s called when they do that thing where they spend a week on a binge, that’s me on this game.

The Movies is really two games. First of all, it’s a simple and surprisingly powerful way to make little movies, machinema, if you will, using your PC and your brain. It’s really quite brilliant, and if you use your head and really put some time into it, it’s amazing what you can create using this game.

On top of this, it’s a movie studio simulator in the vein of The Sims. You have your studio, you hire people to be actors, crew, maintenance, everything, then you do what movie studios do. You have to babysit your talent quite a bit, they get tired, stressed, bored, fat, drunk and old and are incessantly jealous of each other. You have to make them into stars, and then milk all the success out of them you can before they retire.

At first I considered the simulation aspect of the game to be annoying, I just wanted to make the movies. Then I noticed you can do that by using “Sandbox Mode” where you start out rich and can get straight to making the movies and ignore the other aspects of the game.

But before long I found myself enjoying the game more than making the movies. It’s actually really fun, albeit entirely too hard. Staying on the charts is really challenging and if you’re not, no one will come to work for you. Forgive me for pointing out reality, but finding people to be in movies in real life isn’t so challenging. If you’re not one of the top studios in this game, you can’t hire someone to sweep the lot.

Like I said, though, it’s fun as hell. You build your studio, your sets, you can fine tune so much or make your movies from scratch, or focus all your attention on running your studio and just let the directors make their little nonsensical films.

There’s a few problems with the game, there are times when the controls are clumsy or annoying, and all the voice actors sound the same. Or there are only two voice actors, maybe. I dunno.

Just the same, this is one hell of a game. One might wonder why I’m reviewing this non-horror game here, but there’s lots and lots in it for us. My studio focuses on horror and scifi, and there’s tons of fun to be had making bad zombie movies and alien war flicks.

With the release of Stunts & Effects, adding stuntmen and explosions to the game, along with lots of new props and sets, now’s a great time to pick up the core game and see what the buzz is about. Movie fanatics can’t do much better than The Movies.

8 out of 10 zombie flicks I already have planned