Yeah, I’m just getting to this now. It was on my wish list, so the missus picked it up for my birthday. Good of her to do that. Always marry a nerd.<\/p>\n
Lionhead and Peter Molyneux take a lot of beatings for creating games that are high on ambition and low on execution, and, despite the mostly positive reviews that The Movies got, this game has been lumped into the morass of failed expectations by much of the gaming public.<\/p>\n
From what I can see that’s a little unfair. I haven’t really explored the much touted custom movie maker yet and I can already tell that this is a pretty good tycoon game. There are some interface problems, but there is a lot to recommend The Movies at a certain price point.<\/p>\n
What I like most is that The Movies has a sense of time and place that few other games do. The period movies you make have the right feel, the clothing looks right, nothing is garishly out of place unless you advance too quickly on the research curve. I can think of few other “historical” game that has the same clarity about where and when it is set. And considering that the time changes with every passing hour, this is quite an accomplishment. Children of the Nile managed that feeling, but it was consciously an historical simulation, and limited to one time frame. This is a business simulation.<\/p>\n
I may end up being disappointed in the end. But even if this is not the greatest people management sim of all time, I don’t quite get the dismissiveness that many gamers have for this title.<\/p>\n
Actually, I think I do. Molyneux is still paying for Black and White. Developers that embrace publicity can never move out of the shadow of their worst game. Even as Derek Smart’s spaceship sims have improved (still not enough for me to understand them, mind you), he still bears the yoke of Battlecruiser 3000. A name change might let his games escape the past. John Romero will always be stuck with Daikatana. And Molyneux is forever linked with monkeys that throw crap.<\/p>\n
This is partially Molyneux’s fault. He has a history of trumpeting how great and revolutionary his games will be, and from the man who gave me Populous, I expect great and revolutionary things. But Black and White and Fable were only partially successful in meeting expectations that he had raised.<\/p>\n
And so, this good but not great movie making toy is lumped in with Moly’s Follies even though he made none of the same exaggerated predictions about what it would be or how it would transform gaming. Unfair, I think. But gamers are not exactly known for being fair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yeah, I’m just getting to this now. It was on my wish list, so the missus picked it up for my birthday. Good of her to do that. Always marry a nerd. Lionhead and Peter Molyneux take a lot of beatings for creating games that are high on ambition and low on execution, and, despite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-5n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}