What is it?

A cross between The Sims and Theme Hospital (if it were a movie studio). Build the studio, hire the stars, make films, export them online to Lionhead’s official site.

Is it fun?

Yes!

Is it worth the money? £26.99

Yes, if you’re at all creative and like film.

Why?

You get to make movies! The supplied music is bouncy and happy and some of the film clips are hilarious! If the thought of setting up shots and cutting them together bores you to tears, give this one a miss. The studio-running aspects get boring pretty quickly and you’d be better off with The Sims 2.

It’s very much a tool designed for making machinima, with some studio maintenance thrown in. There are minor niggles, like not being able to line up your actors perfectly between shots and being forced into continuity glitches by set-dressing limitations but it’s still a very powerful tool, with post-production effects, like subtitling and editing, and the ability to import your own music. You’ll need a program that converts music files to .ogg. Here’s one. You can also record dialogue or voice-overs in post-production once your lab techs have done the necessary research.

Outside the movie-making it’s very much like The Sims but easier. Your star actors and directors get jealous of each other if they think their underpaid, or have a crappier trailer than they deserve so you give them things to make them happy just long enough for them to do well in the next movie. You do need to play the real game to unlock all the features for the sandbox, but that’s not as tiresome as it could be even though the scriptwriters are constantly wandering around the lot instead of churning out my B-movie scripts!

I’ve been playing it pretty much non-stop for the past week. You can find the first film that I scripted and took all the way through post-production here :) The game only exports to Windows Media Video, which is unfortunate as it means you get fairly poor quality if you keep it to a reasonable download size. It does export full-screen video at quite large file sizes, so it’s easy to burn good-looking copies for your friends. (The user rating system on the official Lionhead movie-showcase site lists voice acting as one of the criteria. I’m rubbish at voice acting so until it gets less embarrassing, I’m keeping away from them. They will be offering downloadable extra props so I’m brushing up on the voice acting at home. In private!!)

Links
Official Lionhead Site
Planet: The Movies

Screenshots

What is it?

A god game with a fighting pet and some warmongering

Is it fun?

No! No! A thousand times no!

Is it worth the money? £27.99

No! You could buy yourself a Darth Tater and a Spud Trooper for that.

Why not?

Tutorials are condescending and treat you like you don’t have the intelligence to infer how to move left once it teaches you how to move right. Nope, you have to sit there and listen to the floaty guy explain it verrrry slowly, with diagrams.

Playing good is basically city planning but you have to place each individual building and then help the people build them. Tedious.

Playing evil can be quite destructive and entertaining, but the villagers are slow-moving idiots. I built a wall and got my archers all nicely lined up on the top looking down at the invading army. I told them to fire on the invaders and what did they do? They climbed off the wall, lined up behind it and fired their arrows over the wall onto the invaders they could no longer see. Brilliant! Not.

I played through loads of the game on the first day I got it, saved, checked out the official site and found out there was a patch that completely killed my savegame and I had to sit through everything I’d just played again. Rubbish!

Buy the original game. It had its flaws but the creature was cute and friendly. My ape would ran laps round the village store and then delight in knocking down trees by pooing on them. Bizarre… It only costs a fiver. Much better value!

Screenshots