The Movies
I've rarely played a game and felt so many conflicting emotions.Peter Molyneux gets an absolutely unfair amount of shit for his work. While other premier designers either create no new I.P. or have one new project every five years, Molyneux introduced Fable last year and The Movies this year. Including the original Black and White in 2001, that's three entirely new projects in the last four and a half years.
Yes, it's fair to say that all of these games have disappointed in various ways, mostly because Molyneux articulates these unbelievably detailed new visions that are never totally fulfilled. But damn, at least he has them. And he's still relevant--in many ways, The Movies is the most important game Molyneux has ever released.
That's where it starts to get complicated.
The game itself is relatively entertaining. I've played for about ten hours and it's been enjoyable and more than a bit compelling. It feels like a Bullfrog game, with all of the Bullfrog charm, which is a high compliment. Managing your actors, helping them improve, shooting films, managing the budget--all the elements for a pleasant, relaxing game are in place.
Then, right when I was having a thoroughly good time, the mid-game started to bog down. It happens at various times depending on how well you research, but in the 1950's I was able to start writing 3-star scripts, and scripts of that quality have nine different scenes to film. Shooting a film takes significantly longer, and about that time the game becomes less interesting, because the amount of dead time increases. It also becomes more difficult as your studio grows to attract enough employees, no matter your studio rating (I'm the highest rated studio in the industry and the new labor pool is almost empty). The single technical issue (stuttering when scrolling across the studio) also becomes more serious as the studio grows, and it's annoying.
And none of those things matter a damn bit.
The reason they don't matter is that almost single-handedly, Peter Molyneux has democratized machinima. The project model involving years of effort and teams and modelers and programmers has been demolished. Now one person can create a machinima film in days.
It's not going to look sophisticated graphically. And that is, by far, the particular genius of this tool. No one can spend months adding sophisticated, brilliant graphics because the tool can't support them.
All they can do is tell stories.
Think about that for a minute. This is the very first tool for machinima that is both easy enough for anyone to use as well as focusing solely on storytelling.
That's freaking brilliant. The Movies is a Trojan Horse for true creativity.
Last wek I saw a thirteen minute film about three Islamic youths in France and the unique paths each of them took to reach a single moment where they were all involved in the same riot. It's somewhat crude and the subtitles are full of errors (which is understandable, with a non-native English speaker), but it tells a fully coherent and meaningful story. And the ability to tell stories so easily is stunning.
If you'd like to see it, go here: http://movies.lionhead.com/movie/11520.
It is absolutely unimportant that 90% of the movies created by the movie-making tool will be complete crap. What's important is that as many people make these movies as possible, because out of thousands of people, somewhere, we will find a genius. Or several. And democratizing the tool to make it accessible to all of us has exponentially increased the ability of creative people to tell their stories.
That, in the end, is why this is Molynuex's most important game. His creativity will allow us to create--not just an elite group, but all of us.
<< Home