The Movies is a good game; just a tad shy from great. This is not faint praise at all, I assure you. The Movies in its original incarnation is one of few games that I had an absolute blast playing while losing in an absolutely horrible manner. My very first studio (the name escapes me now, but that's probably for the best as it was probably a name funny to me only, which says nothing for my elitism and everything for my inept humor) went bankrupt in 1939. The game starts you off in 1920. I went down in flames by trying my hand at creating my own movie instead of using a pre-made script. Alas, I did not understand the specific mannerisms of this process and ended up with an epic 5.5-hour western/romance that took 5 years to film, drove two actors and a director insane and did not make me anywhere near the amount of money I needed from it.. Maybe if I had the ability to add a car chase or some random explosions, I would have had a better movie. With the recently released expansion pack, The Movies: Stunts and Effects, players now have this option, but is it as awesome as it sounds?

Re-imagining, not remake!
It seems logical that the next weapon to add to any move-maker's arsenal would be the ability to render fantastic action set-pieces and thrilling chases, elements all sorely lacking form the original game. The expansion gives the player the option to start a new game (or port an existing saved game) from the start date of 1920 or to do a quick start from 1960, the date the stunt tools and abilities become available. This is a nifty feature that allows a player to delve right into the new content without having to devote hours of gameplay to content they've already played.

The player builds a Stunt Training Center that works just like the Actor or Crew buildings, where you use your hand of God (oh, Peter Molyneaux!) to pluck unsuspecting applicants and drop them into their position and then, presto, stunt men. Of course any stuntmen you create suck at what they do and need to be trained, so you buy some training facilities and set them to task where a green bar above their heads measures progress a la The Sims. Stunts have five degrees of difficulty and the player's stuntmen need to be up to task because stunts are measured on a pass/fail system and any failed stunts will harm afinished movie's rating. I guess this makes players the equivalent of Roger Corman; too cheap to pay for second takes.

Glitz and Gloss
Stunts and Effects looks just like The Movies. The graphics are good, but for this kind of game they don't need to be great. The detail level is adequately simple and the characters move like pantomimes, but I think that's kind of the point. Still, with an expansion set it would have been nice to see some small graphical tweaks, such as support for increased resolution. The Movies looks and acts like The Sims but did away with a lot of the tedious tasks. Instead of setting actors or directors to train and then watch them interminably, The Makeover tool was introduced that allows players to retrain their characters without boring themselves stupid bywatching a green bar inch its way to completion. Sadly, Stunts and Effects adopts the Sims-style training and yes Virginia, it does become tedious. Make a stunt man, set him to a stunt until he reaches one he cannot perform, train him, set him to the stunt, rinse, and repeat. There's not much strategy there, or even fun. In watching a finished film, I'm sad to report that the stunts themselves are lackluster. The finished products in The Movies were always simple, goofy, and incomprehensible, which is good and fine, and set the game's tone fairly early on. The probably with stunt scenes adopting the same characteristics is that stunts should not be simple, goofy, or incomprehensible. It kind of defeats the purpose of having a stunt.

The RoboCop/RoboCop 2 Comparison is Inevitable
I cannot shake feelings of disappointment with The Movies: Stunts and Effects. I like the original game and was awaiting an expansion pack because there were a ton of different directions to take this game. The idea of adding stunts is a good one and could have been capitalized on better. The gameplay is flat, repetitive, derivative, and the content is kind of flimsy. In addition to stunt capabilities, new sets and costumes are added, but I found nothing jaw-dropping or drool-worthy to mention. This expansion fails to deliver enough of the old Hollywood glitz to make Stunts and Effects a worthwhile purchase to anyone but hardcore fans or completionists. In this case, leave the "director's cut" on the shelf and stick to the original.

-doctordoom99