You're In The Movies Review

With all of the attention and money pouring into music games, it's interesting to see the performance gameplay spotlight turned towards movies. For the uninitiated, You're in the Movies tasks players with participating in a series of EyeToy-style minigames in front of the Xbox camera (punch some targets, shoo away bugs) and brief acting challenges like ''look scared'' or ''do an evil laugh.'' After 20 to 30 minutes of acting, the footage is recompiled into one of 30 fake movie trailers ranging from sci-fi to horror to romantic comedy.

If you're willing to loosen up and act silly, the end product can be hilarious, especially if you completely ignore the ''director's'' instructions. While you can't send these videos over Xbox Live, you can easily download them to your computer (the .wmv files clock in just under 20MB). Handy FAQs make uploading to YouTube a snap, which is technically impressive and also a great way to embarrass friends from last night's party.

The gimmick loses its luster after a few sessions. Minigames start to repeat (be prepared for a lot of jogging), standard gaming camera issues (like constant calibration and missing torsos) pop up, and once you know how the whole process works the end products aren't as satisfying (''oh, I'm turning a valve. I guess there's a driving scene in this one). There's no option for a shorter session like in Buzz or Scene It, so the rounds begin to drag. With half-hour sessions at parties, larger groups can't rotate people in and out of participation like with Rock Band, and even if you just have four people, I can't see anyone wanting to play more than two sequences in a row.

While single player is an option, it's sadder than singing karaoke alone in your living room. Director's mode allows you to mash up your own scenes and add narration via a headset, but inflexible tools and lo-fi sound quality ensure that few will invest much in this feature.

You're in the Movies' biggest fault, however, is that it doesn't put people in real movies – just cheesy fakes. Why can't we deliver any lines? It's just a bunch of miming around. Imagine how sweet it would be if you could say ''Hasta la vista, baby'' before blasting the T-1000 in Terminator 2.