Developed by Zoë Mode for the Xbox 360

Published by Codemasters

Rated "E" for Everyone and includes comic mischief, mild language, mild violence

With a webcam perched on the top of your television, “You’re In The Movies” aims to transform your living room into a movie studio. The game guides you and your friends to act out silly movements and make funny faces in front of the recording camera and then inserts your performances into a campy B-movie where you are the stars. The schlocky movies, which feature 1950’s-styled genres including science-fiction, horror, corny romances and murder mysteries, are the perfect choice as the quality of the webcam and its video-editing software is quite primitive. It delivers just enough novelty for you and your friends to have a good laugh, both at and with each other.

The concept works like this. The camera begins by taking a picture of your living room which it uses as a reference image. As it continues to record, it detects any new changes between what it sees and the image it has on file. So when you step in front of the camera, it senses you as a new object and captures your silhouette. It can do this for up to four people and in each case can edit them out of the footage its recording and into any of thirty movies created specifically for the game.

As you and your friends are not trained actors, the game tricks you into getting the movements it needs by having you perform a series of activities or mini-games. The camera can track the motion of your head and arms and uses these to challenge you to virtually ride a scooter, pull a rope, strike dance poses, or toss balls through a hoop. There are over fifty different activities. In each case it’s you that appears on the screen as the one starring in the mini-game, it’s you riding the scooter, pulling the virtual rope, etc. With four players, you will spend a good thirty minutes playing these little mini-games, earning points against each other and competing in special matches where two players try to out-run each other in a marathon or sling virtual mud at each other, that you wouldn’t be blamed if you forgot what the main goal of the overall game was supposed to be. How banging a series of conga drums to make monkeys dance is supposed to relate to a crime noir film isn’t something you’ll understand until the very end of the process.

Once the games are over and a winner is declared, then you and your friends, no doubt quite exhausted from all the running and jumping about, can sit down and watch a one-minute clip where all the actions you’ve performed in the games are now inserted into a short movie and given new meaning. That game where you were hitting drums to make monkeys dance? In the movie those same actions make you look like you a detective, typing away at a typewriter. Earlier you ran in a virtual marathon, now in the movie you are running from the police. Those dance poses? Now karate moves as you fight thugs. It takes the rather lame and uncomfortable performances you delivered as you tried to win the games and makes them cool or deliciously melodramatic. You may not have set out to become a super hero, scream queen, and scene-chewing villain, but now you are and it’s a laugh-out surprise to your friends as much as it is to yourself. The movies can be saved onto the Xbox 360’s hard drive where you can replay them again and again, but can’t transfer them to a DVD or share them outside your home.

All of this hinges upon a technology that is sloppy. The lighting conditions of your home, the arrangement of your furniture or interior design, the way you set up the camera, are all elements that can cause havoc with the camera’s ability to accurately edit out your body from the living room behind you. Even with the ideal conditions, there’s a ghostly shimmer that appears around each person and as you move about and the light changes even slightly across your body, your hands, elbows, even entire sections of your chest or face can suddenly vanish. Although there is software settings to compensate for fluorescent or incandescent lighting, and a “Cutout Studio” utility that lets you recalibrate the camera in the middle of any game, the results can still vary widely and can be a disappointment after you get past the neat idea of what the game is trying to do. In the same way that early television set owners used to obsessively play with their rooftop aerials and rabbit ear antennae to find the best reception, I expect that many “You’re In The Movies” owners will be obsessively tweaking their room lighting and interior design to try to get the best results here too.

At the beginning, most of the movie choices are locked. You begin with six movies to act out, and then as you record your own version of those, you’ll unlock another six until you eventually reach all thirty movies on the disc. Each has four roles and should you not have four people to play them, come with their own stock performances to fill in the gap. If you play the game by yourself, you will appear in the movie with three virtual actors included in the game.

Playing through the movies will also unlock a video editing feature called the “Director Mode” where you can use an editing stage to assemble your choice of scenes from any or the thirty movies on the disc to create your own movie type. You can also choose to use any of the included soundtracks or use the webcam’s microphone to record your own. Once assembled, you can then record your own performances to insert into the assembled scenes and in that sense create your own movie. While it’s not sophisticated enough a feature to let you compose a proper original movie, it offers just enough customization to satisfy the mash-up hobbyists.

In the end, “You’re In The Movies” isn’t quite the movie magic you want it to be. It takes a great deal of work for what is essentially a novelty gag that, yes, is fun for a night amongst you and a group of friends, but like a silly board game will only get pulled out for use when everyone’s in the mood.