Holiday You-Wish List

The Movies

Activision, $49.99

In the world of The Movies, considering how much work you do as the wannabe mogul that you are, you actually control very little. You fill your lot with important buildings, lay concrete slabs to connect them, and plant palm trees to make your studio look fancy. You try to build a studio impressive enough to attract employees, from scriptwriters to janitors. But as soon as you hire everybody, they start running amok all about your lot, building things and lining up at your snack stand and using your strategically placed restroom all by themselves. So, while you can put a script into motion or give the go-ahead for shooting, the actual moviemaking in the beginning goes on independently, as you spend most of your time monitoring your actors' vitals – their eating and drinking, their boredom and stress levels – or trying to buddy them up at the bar you just built to improve their onscreen chemistry. Or you're scanning your massive lot for that tiny janitor you hired so you can drag him (they go, "Hey!" or "Wha?" when you pick them up) to where your starlet just littered. From your shrubs to your stars, every little thing affects your studio's success, to the point that when you can finally afford your postproduction facility and find yourself layering dialogue and music at the editing bay (eventually, you can even upload your self-scripted and -edited movies and compare them to others' online), it's like you've been pulled into a completely different game. I actually found myself impatient to return to micromanaging, eager to leave the moviemaking to my underpaid experts. I guess nobody ever said that being a mogul is fun. But oddly absorbing, definitely.