The Movies: Stunts & Effects

The Good
The Movies from Lionhead Studios, was an excellent PC game. With a effective blend of lot management, and film making, it was perhaps Lionhead’s best game. With the release of The Movies: Stunts and Effects, expansion pack, you can now bring explosive special effects in to your films, and turn a bland action flick into an explosive hit!

I’m ready for my close up, Mr. Megid!

More action is not all that this expansion offers. There are also new sets, props, costumes, and even the ability to shoot a scene from just about any angle. But first.

In this expansion, you can either continue a former The Movies game, with the additions. Or you can jump right into the new content. This option gives you a new studio. But unlike in the original you do not have to start in the 1920’s. Your game will begin in the 1960’s.

From here, you can build a stunt school. Hire and train stunt performers. Keep them in top shape, to minimize injuries during the film making process. Once you are satisfied with the skill of your new employees. It is time to make the movies.

During the film making process, you can assign stunt performers to stand in for your stars for those tricky stunts. Just make sure the stunt professional looks like your actor. I.e. don’t cast a male stunt performer for a female actor. Or to increase the stunt success as well as the overall success of the film, you can have your actors perform there own stunts. It is a gamble but could pay off.(I made a film in which my main actor did all his own stunts, even the hard ones, with little difficulty.-MM-)

Stunts rate from simple tumbles, to difficult running from explosions. Even stunt men can be injured trying to pull of the extra hard stunts. But that is were the hospital comes into play. If an actor or stunt man is harmed doing a stunt, then just let them heal up in the studio hospital.

I Outta Be In Pictures!

New sets include green screens, blue screens, miniature city sets and so much more. With these you can have huge action scenes with little danger to your cast. For example the mini city set allows you to have aerial dog fights, and city wide explosions! Or make a picture with huge monsters terrorizing a city.(Godzilla…run for your life!-MM-) Blue screens and green screens as in actual movies allow, you to use extravagant back drops, and plot special effects.

New sets help keep your movies fresh. And allow you to expand the various types of pictures you can make.

New costumes, are frankly one of the best new features of the game. Spice up your Sci-fi epic with more varied and realistic looking alien creatures. Terrify horror movie fans with deadly real zombies and howlingly scary werewolves. These alone would have made for a killer expansion.

The Bad
There could be more. So much more. You can not stage sword fights. Nor can you have fight scenes while the set burns.

The Movies: Stunts And Effects, will take an additional 1 Gig of hard drive space.

Other than that it should run of most PC’s.

I would have liked to see a feature that allows you to have a bigger lot. Or maybe shoot on location.

The Bottom Line
Overall, this expansion makes an excellent game even better.(So now it’s super-excellent!-MM-) Those of you whom enjoyed The Movies, simply have to play this game. It is REQUIRED gameplay.