Comments on: Machinima Made Easy, Within a Tycoon Sim

By: The Output-Oriented Game (OOG) — The Movies at WRT: Writer Response Theory

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 07:26:07 +0000

[...] analyze for his book. The Movies takes a tycoon game and mashes it with Machinima, as Andrew Stern has pointed out on GTxA.Crucial to Crawford is t [...]

By: andrew

andrew — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 00:11:42 +0000

Here's a detailed review on a blog of The Movies that finds it not much better than terrible. A December NYTimes blurb has the opposite opinion.

By: peter krapp

peter krapp — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:19:56 +0000

although machinima enthusiasts might be part of the target audience for this release, I doubt they will find it as interesting as other game engines; the camera controls appear to be pretty limited, and if you want to have fun struggling against a cliché, many other games offer that option already ;-)

By: Brandon

Brandon — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:35:09 +0000

I wish I could view some of the movies on the Lionhead site, but it doesn’t like my FireFox and my IE is out of date.

By: andrew

andrew — Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:00:34 +0000

Like SpiderMonkey says, stinging reviews are enjoyable to read, but I also usually learn something from them, as I found Craig's review useful. It helps balance out the hype — much like this biting essay on Brass Lantern does for Facade. Checks and balances — keeps us from getting ahead of ourselves. Patrick, we're in agreement that we want more procedural characters in games; however I can't criticize Lionhead for not doing more than they did here (with the caveat that I haven't played the game yet, so it might suck more than I realize). The pressures to reduce design and technology risk in a big budget game are enormous; given that, it looks like they made a interesting and unusual step forward.

By: Patrick Dugan

Patrick Dugan — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 20:40:13 +0000

I think Craig’s points about the need for more procedural movie content (particularily animations) and the need for an engine that can track, anticipate, and guide the causation, are the real pearls of that post. These are things that Facade did very well, so it seems like common sense that “The Movies”, with its vastly more narrow interface bandwidth and agent complexity would be able to pull some of the same technical manuevers.

As Micheal put it in his speech at the “Future Play Conference”, when describing Andrew and hsi brainstorming sessions for Facade, (paraphrasing) “Do we want procedural characters? Of course. Do we want a drama management system? Of course.” People have criticized Facade for being impractical to immediate game development converns, but those two points in particular really should be seen as a matter of course when doing games with virtual people and related content.

By: Criag

Criag — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 19:40:16 +0000

I didn’t intend my review (the one cited by Patrick) to be a review that tells you whether to buy the game or not. You should buy the game: it’s interesting and definitely worth experiencing, if only to see how their design fits together well, and where the cracks are. My review is attempting – and evidently failing – to show why I believe they didn’t do it right.

By: SpiderMonkey

SpiderMonkey — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 16:09:30 +0000

Though it’s a fairly entertaining read, I wouldn’t really call Perko’s article a review or “sharp” or anything involving “critical analysis”. It comes across more as someone who doesn’t like some of the fundamental choices Lionhead have made throughout the creation of the game, but rather than asking “why did Lionhead do it like this?”, he seems far more eager to continually shout “Lionhead didn’t do what I would have done, so their choice is .” It also doesn’t read very informatively if you aren’t already very familiar with the game. Both of these things make it hard to extract any real insight from what he’s written.

By: Emotionally Challenged » Lionheads “The Movies”

Emotionally Challenged » Lionheads “The Movies” — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 07:00:44 +0000

[...] Filed: General » Ian Wilson @ 2005-11-17, 16:00 EET

Just reading a post about “The Movies” by UK gam [...]

By: Patrick Dugan

Patrick Dugan — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 20:33:42 +0000

GameSpot does some fine journalism typically, but they aren’t what you’d call great agitators for critical analysis or industry change. A much sharper review can be found here: http://projectperko.blogspot.com/2005/11/movies.html

I think alot of the criticisms Mr. Perko makes illustrates that Lionhead could have gotten a much better execution had they paid attention to some of the recent work in expressive AI and animation, Facade being a prime example.