You’re in the Mov ies Review

November 25, 2008 by admin
Filed under: PSP News

Microsoft’s been vying for a piece of the casual-gaming market for some time, and with You’re in the Movies, they’ve finally entered the game-you-only-bring-out-at-parties niche. Unfortunately, laughs lead to exasperation as the trailer-creation process quickly becomes monotonous…and the paltry results aren’t reward enough for the effort.

The game — in conjunction with the included Xbox Vision camera — basically lets you green-screen yourself and friends into cheap B-movie trailers. To create a trailer, you play several minigames; the camera mo-caps your actions and uses the footage to populate your trailer. A tornado-escape minigame, for example, has you waving your arms as fast as you can to elude the windstorm; in the resulting trailer, that same footage is used for fleeing from some sort of threat. But before you begin playing the minigames, you’ll toil over a hefty amount of setup time. Under the best conditions, your clothing, hair, and skin tone should contrast with your background. If, like me, you’ve got a stuffed apartment with a color scheme similar to a bowl of Fruity Pebbles that’s been sitting out for an hour, the “actors” in your trailers will sport severed limbs, floating heads, and bodies that look half-cannibalized. You’ll also have to be conscious of lighting and the average height of everyone involved (framing one really tall person and one really short person together messes with the scale). All this setup, and you’re not even playing the game yet!