Lights, Camera, Good Times!

Published December 29, 2008

My greatest pleasure in gaming is when a little known title reaches past the marketing and hype and shakes up my game experience with something fresh, interesting, and unapologetically original. You're in the Movies® by Codemasters attempts to do just that.

Mad Libs for Movies
You're in the Movies uses the Xbox LIVE® Vision Camera to capture you and your friends' living room antics via hilariously themed mini-games. It then infuses those captured shenanigans into pre-made B-movie trailers to be preserved for future hilarity.

Beware the mighty Tabby.

In many ways the game plays out like Mad Libs for movies. Every mini-game and acting sequence is captured and directed in isolation. You're never sure just how your activities of running in terror, disco dancing, fly swatting, or mud-slinging will be translated into the movie trailer at the end of the game.

There are thirty trailers in all and they incorporate a wide range of cheesy premises, including the clone-happy Me, Me and Me, the superhero epic Everyone's Super, the lizard horror-flick Cold Blooded, the ghostly hijnks of Four's Company, and many, many more.

Trust me, when you see your Mom's scream of terror succeeded by an army of your fist-shaking, evil-eye-staring clones chasing after her, you'll know the genius of You're in the Movies.

Action and Acting
Whenever it's your turn to take the spotlight in You're in the Movies, you'll participate in one of two different kinds of activities: acting or action. Action sequences run the gamut from running in place to avoid an angry bull to swatting frantically at virtual bees, beating down cardboard bandits, yanking on a pulley to pull up buried treasure, and other equally outlandish activities based on embarrassment-inducing premises.

The bees! The bees! Act like you mean it.

By contrast, the "acting" sequences ask you to step up in front of the camera, listen to some simple direction, and get busy performing. In my experience, the more seriously you take the acting, the more you'll clutch your kidneys while running for the bathroom because you can't stop laughing at the results.

Party Time
Where You're in the Movies truly excels is in its ability to draw those that normally never play games right into the action. When you invite friends and family to play and they ask "How do I do it?" you don't have to hand them a controller and run through the buttons one by one. Instead, point to the screen and tell them to act out whatever the game tells them to do. If my Mom can play, anyone can. Truer words have rarely been spoken.

Easy Setup
It's worth noting that setting up and calibrating You're in the Movies with the Xbox LIVE Vision Camera requires little to no technical know-how. Indeed, after plopping the camera on top of my TV, all I needed to do was adjust the focus a shade and shift the angle to account for everyone playing slightly to one side of the TV instead of directly in front of the screen.

After that, the game took care of the rest, including taking a photo of our very busy background (festive holiday decorations included), which it used to help determine what to capture and what to leave behind during play.

Shake it! You're on camera.

This means you don't have to rearrange your entire living room just to play a single round and that alone is an enormous relief.

Share the Good Times
Completing a movie and reveling in its unabashedly preposterous trailer with everyone in the living room is always good times, but let's be honest, when your Mom shakes her booty at roughly 1200 RPM, you're going to want the whole world to see.

You can upload your completed You're in the Movies masterpieces for download onto your computer, after which you can share your clips with whomever you please!

Director Time
The live-action mini-games and acting are outstanding fun come party time, but for the hardcore gamer, it's the Director Mode that holds the real allure. Here you can mix and match clips, create your own scripts or tweak existing ones, add soundtracks, record voiceover, and otherwise cut together your own movie trailers.

Dedicated gamers can flex their creativity to create some astonishingly inventive clips to match and even exceed the thirty professionally produced trailers that come on the disc. This is most likely where you will spend the bulk of your time.

You're in the Movies for Xbox 360® takes a wildly original concept and brings it to life in a way that's accessible to anyone, anywhere. There's no intimidating gameplay, no confusing control scheme. It's just zany antics, laughter, and a workout of your funny bone. Lights, camera, good times!

Article by Ryan Treit