The Movies: Stunts & Effects Expansion Pack can give aspiring filmmakers a taste of the director's life, complete with tight budgets and temperamental actors.

Although it shares the empire-building goals of a typical simulation, unlike many sims, The Movies is actually two games in one. One part of the game focuses on empire building, or in this case, studio building. Starting from almost nothing, your challenge is to build a successful movie production empire. The other part of the game focuses on creating the product you will be marketing. Like most games, you have to work to get access to all of the good stuff, but once you do, you will have access to many pre- and post-production tools, including sets, costumes, camera techniques, titles, special effects, and voiceovers that you can use to create your own movies, although you're somewhat limited by the built-animations.

The Stunts & Effects Expansion Pack opens up a whole new world by providing a large collection of new special effects, sets, scenes, backdrops, costumes, vehicles, and props. You can still choose whether to concentrate on the movie mogul or film director/producer aspects of the game, but it's difficult to resist spending most of your time directing. Plus, most of the new features are on the directing side of the equation. You can now hire and train stuntmen (and women), as well as actors, and determine the level of complexity and danger of the stunts. New blue-screen and green-screen sets, similar to the ones used in real Hollywood movies, allow you to shoot actors against a "blank" background, and then place them in death-defying scenes later. A new Freecam Mode gives you more control over the camera's location, angle, and field of view. New miniature models allow you to create special scenes without the time and expense of creating full-size sets. You can also write and direct your own scripts.

The Movies: Stunts & Effects Expansion Pack isn't the same as a course in filmmaking at a local university, but it may be the next best thing. It's also a lot more fun.


Pros: Offers many hours of entertainment and creative challenges, colorful and detailed backgrounds and characters
Cons: Allowing your studio to grow beyond a certain size may make managing the needs of the players an all-consuming task and may kill a lot of the fun

Specifications:
Available for: IBM PCs and compatibles.

Minimum requirements (PC):
3D Hardware Accelerator Card--100% DirectX 9.0 compatible 32MB Hardware T&L-capable video card and latest drivers
Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP
Full installation of The Movies 1.0 or 1.1
Pentium III 800Mhz or Athlon 800Mhz processor or higher
256MB RAM
8X CD-Rom drive and latest drivers
650MB of uncompressed free hard disk space (plus 500MB for Windows swap file)
100% DirectX 9.0 compatible 16-bit sound card and latest drivers
100% Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard, and latest drivers
DirectX 9.0c
Online content requires broadband connection and the latest drivers.