'The Movies' is kind of two things in one really. You can play with it as originally intended, which is as an 'empire building' game, where you start in the 1920s with a studio, making silent movies and work your way right up to the present day, or forego all that if you like and just use the movie making facilities to do stuff like I made there (note that to do some of that explosion stuff I think you may need the expansion disk for it too, because the expansion disk adds much more flexibility with the camera positions you can use).
Within the game, if you choose to play it that way, there are elements such as grooming stars, looking after them, poaching from other studios and all that kind of malarkey, or you can skip all that if you like and just go with the basics. There's quite a sophisticated character building utility that comes with it too, this allows you to produce 'actors' with pretty much any appearance you like, that's quite good fun to play with on its own, I actually did manage to produce decent look alikes for some real life people with it for one thing I made a while ago, which quite surprised me actually.
Either way, the entire thing absolutely reeks of quality and it's the kind of software you don't really see too much these days, in that it is massively well produced and very engrossing.
You aren't limited to war movies with it of course, you could make soap opera type stuff if you liked, westerns, cop thrillers, car chases, sci-fi etc, anything you like really. I've even used it to create still pictures as a reference guide for artwork I was producing for a client once or twice, to make it easier to sketch something, so there's another thing it wasn't really intended for that you could do with it.
Because you can do your own blue screen and green screen special effects, there isn't really a limit on the kind of scenes you can do, literally anything you can get a picture of could be a set for your movie. You can do all the titles, post production dubbing and stuff like that too - if you really want to try the entire Hollywood thing.
Another interesting aspect is illustrated in that clip at the top of the thread. Because the Wings Over Vietnam flight simulator doesn't have a replay capability, all the scenes using that sim, have to be flown and recorded at the same time (with FRAPS), which means many of them have to be flown on the external view while using wierd camera angles. So I've ended up being quite a good stunt pilot in the process!
Considering you can get the main game and the 'stunts and effects' expansion disk for 20 quid, I personally think it's a real bargain; if you like messing about with sounds and pictures, I think you'd like it, or if you've ever thought:
'this movie is crap, I could do better than that', here's a chance to see if you realy could do better!
All of which makes you appreciate the good real life movie directors and enables you to spot spot the really crappy ones:rotfl:
Chock