This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content.

The Movies gives players a Sims like experience as they become a movie mogul working his way through the history of Hollywood. The game features three unique styles of play including studio management involving buildings, budgets and people, managing stars including dealing with actors, directors, personalities and their addictions and finally straight movie-making which allows people to be completely creative with over 1,000 pre-rendered scenes.

The game is a sim of how creative you can be in making, editing and sounding movies and the title even rates your film from a computer generated audience. The Movies first starts in the 1920's as you start from scratch developing and doing research on movies. You work through the silent era and progress in time adding new features like computer graphics, costumes and more from every decade till now.

Overall the game features a lot to offer as you must keep track of all your character's stats as well as develop the movie. If you want to focus on just movie making and not deal with all the management options you are free to do that as well. The game looks to feature 45 sets, hundreds of costumes and 8,000 scenes where you can adjust the outcome of every one with sliders that affect the character personalities. Beyond that, you can put in weather, lighting and more to change the scene as you see fit.

The graphics for The Movies look very impressive, the characters are much in the same build as The Sims and the array of scenes and character emotions are impressive and truly show off the game's graphics. The controls for The Movies are also very good as it is simple point and click from the different buildings to begin creating your movie, picking your stars, costumes and more.

Along with more on the single player, certain times will determine a movies success so if you make a sci-fi film during the launch of Sputnik it'll be a big success. After you make you movie, there is of course post-production and movie editor in which you can put in subtitles, your own voiceover by recording it, music and more. Finally after that you'll have to market it.

Finally, the game looks to feature film festivals where you can put your finished movie online and also see what other people have done. Activision has also stated there are already plans for an expansion for The Movies as well.

Overall, The Movies is shaping up to be a hit for the PC in much the same way as The Sims. The games controls and graphics are very similar to the PC hit and the various options including management, star support and straight movie making should have something for everyone. If you like The Sims you'll definitely like The Movies so keep an eye for more as we close in on the PC's fall release.