I was bumbling around the console game section of Best Buy last week looking for a bigger XBox hard drive when I saw this strange little game on the shelf. The trend these days is toward creating games that have you doing something other than sitting in a chair pushing buttons with minute hand twitches and drying eyeballs. You’re In The Movies is a unique game in that genre.
The game is packaged differently because it comes with a small USB video camera. This is a shame because I has already (for some reason) bought the XBox video camera, and now I have two. I didn’t see a copy of the game without the camera, and this box was shelved in a different location because of the non-standard game box.
The game’s object… There is a point system. That’s hardly the point of the game though. I think I’d be better off describing what you do in the game, and what the end product is.
Gameplay basically consists of performing a series of minigames by moving around in front of the camera. Like Sony’s eye-toy for the Playstation, the Xbox superimposes the video it captures from the camera, and “sees” when you’re moving and touching things on the screen.
I’m not sure how sophisticated the eye-toy software is, but in You’re In The Movies, the game takes a moment to capture a clean shot of the “set” with none of the players in front of the camera. With this clean shot, it is able to reasonably remove the background from the shot and show only the player on-screen with none of the background. This is very useful and required for this game to do what it does.
To start the game, you position yourself on-screen inside of one of four silhouettes. Each one is labeled with the role you will play. This positioning is also used to take the photo for your avatar throughout the game, which is superimposed on a Hollywood-style star. Any role not filled by a player is played by one of several pre-recorded people built-into the game.
The minigames are silly little things like running away from charging bulls, turning a valve wheel, and punching various on-screen bad guys or targets. One or two players play a game at a time, and the games come in groups of three “acts”, between which the players’ progress in the game is shown. There are quite a few games, and each of them is reasonably entertaining and/or challenging. But that’s not really the fun part.
After you compete with up to three other players at the minigames, You’re In The Movies produces a cheesy B-movie trailer using the clips it captured while you were playing the game.
So that valve you were closing? Yeah, that’s you sitting behind the wheel of a car. That bull you were running away from? Now it’s zombies. Punching targets? Crashing through a science lab as a giant monster of death.
At the end of the sets of minigames, you watch your movie and are given the option to save it to the XBox drive and even send it to your XBox Live account for later download. I have downloaded one of the videos I made with Abby and Riley, and uploaded it to Viddler to attach to this post. The manipulation of the movie files went surprisingly smoothly – no weird DRM, no strange formats, no locked-in flash/silverlight formats.
When the movie screening is complete, the game tallies the points from the minigames and shows an Academy Awards-style ceremony. The winner gets to make a few winning remarks from the podium to a cheering crowd.
The chroma-key technique the game uses is both sophisticated and incomplete. It’s somewhat challenging to light the set properly so that the cutout algorithm works perfectly. There’s an amusing little training video at the start of the game that explains how to do all this. I think our family room is simply not rigged with good lighting.
The movies themselves are pretty varied. There are many genres to choose from, all pretty cheesy. When you’ve completed enough movies, a “director” feature becomes enabled that allows you to assemble existing scene components to create a movie of your own, complete with custom voice-over via a standard Xbox Live headset.
The game seems to have the ability to download new movie content, which would be a great expansion to this game. We haven’t completed all of the movies in the system yet, but we’re getting close. I would love to see some useful new set components for director’s mode, as well as some additional pre-assembled movies.
This game is just fun. And it’s one of the more creative games I’ve seen for the XBox lately. I’m not sure how much more you can do with the camera, but this certainly makes the purchase worthwhile. Hopefully they produce more content for this game, and make some more games that make creative use of the camera like this one.
Please enjoy the movie we made, Vampire Villas:
