I was bumbling around the console game section of Best Buy last week looking for a bigger XBox hard drive when I saw this strange little game on the shelf. The trend these days is toward creating games that have you doing something other than sitting in a chair pushing buttons with minute hand twitches and drying eyeballs. You're In The Movies is a unique game in that genre.

The game is packaged differently because it comes with a small USB video camera. This is a shame because I has already (for some reason) bought the XBox video camera, and now I have two. I didn't see a copy of the game without the camera, and this box was shelved in a different location because of the non-standard game box.

The game's object... There is a point system. That's hardly the point of the game though. I think I'd be better off describing what you do in the game, and what the end product is.

Gameplay basically consists of performing a series of minigames by moving around in front of the camera. Like Sony's eye-toy for the Playstation, the Xbox superimposes the video it captures from the camera, and "sees" when you're moving and touching things on the screen.

I'm not sure how sophisticated the eye-toy software is, but in You're In The Movies, the game takes a moment to capture a clean shot of the "set" with none of the players in front of the camera. With this clean shot, it is able to reasonably remove the background from the shot and show only the player on-screen with none of the background. This is very useful and required for this game to do what it does.

To start the game, you position yourself on-screen inside of one of four silhouettes. Each one is labeled with the role you will play. This positioning is also used to take the photo for your avatar throughout the game, which is superimposed on a Hollywood-style star. Any role not filled by a player is played by one of several pre-recorded people built-into the game.

The minigames are silly little things like running away from charging bulls, turning a valve wheel, and punching various on-screen bad guys or targets. One or two players play a game at a time, and the games come in groups of three "acts", between which the players' progress in the game is shown. There are quite a few games, and each of them is reasonably entertaining and/or challenging. But that's not really the fun part.

After you compete with up to three other players at the minigames, You're In The Movies produces a cheesy B-movie trailer using the clips it captured while you were playing the game.

So that valve you were closing? Yeah, that's you sitting behind the wheel of a car. That bull you were running away from? Now it's zombies. Punching targets? Crashing through a science lab as a giant monster of death.

At the end of the sets of minigames, you watch your movie and are given the option to save it to the XBox drive and even send it to your XBox Live account for later download. I have downloaded one of the videos I made with Abby and Riley, and uploaded it to Viddler to attach to this post. The manipulation of the movie files went surprisingly smoothly -- no weird DRM, no strange formats, no locked-in flash/silverlight formats.

When the movie screening is complete, the game tallies the points from the minigames and shows an Academy Awards-style ceremony. The winner gets to make a few winning remarks from the podium to a cheering crowd.

The chroma-key technique the game uses is both sophisticated and incomplete. It's somewhat challenging to light the set properly so that the cutout algorithm works perfectly. There's an amusing little training video at the start of the game that explains how to do all this. I think our family room is simply not rigged with good lighting.

The movies themselves are pretty varied. There are many genres to choose from, all pretty cheesy. When you've completed enough movies, a "director" feature becomes enabled that allows you to assemble existing scene components to create a movie of your own, complete with custom voice-over via a standard Xbox Live headset.

The game seems to have the ability to download new movie content, which would be a great expansion to this game. We haven't completed all of the movies in the system yet, but we're getting close. I would love to see some useful new set components for director's mode, as well as some additional pre-assembled movies.

This game is just fun. And it's one of the more creative games I've seen for the XBox lately. I'm not sure how much more you can do with the camera, but this certainly makes the purchase worthwhile. Hopefully they produce more content for this game, and make some more games that make creative use of the camera like this one.

Please enjoy the movie we made, Vampire Villas:

I would like to offer my comparison between the games Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but first I will mention something about my broken Rock Band drum set.

I bought Rock Band for myself before Christmas, having had a great time with Guitar Hero 2, and wanting to try out the crazy drum setup. I've been playing for a while, and my snare drum (the red one on the far left) has gradually stopped working well. It's at the point now that I have to bang on the drum really hard just to get it to register.

I've seen videos on the web about other people having trouble with their drum sets. Apparently, there were some issues with the early models (which I'm sure is what I have considering I pre-paid for mine) that are fixed in later revisions. EA is being awesome about replacing the broken drum kits. I've visited their site and ordered my free drum kit replacement. Hopefully I'll be swapping out the drums early next week.

That said, let me get into my comparison between the games, and what I think they should do with the next version of Rock Band and/or Guitar Hero.

I should say from the start that I really like both games. I think the concept is simple, but effective, and the music selection has been, for the most part, both top-notch and groovalicious. But there are places where the games don't overlap that I think could be improved.

For example, one of my favorite additions in Rock Band is that you can continue to accrue star power while you have star power activated. I've always thought it would be a great trick if you could make your way from the beginning of a song to the end with star power running through the whole thing, just by hitting the special notes as you go. There aren't any songs that allow this, but there are many songs that allow you to go for long periods by spanning between star power notes.

What I like best about Guitar Hero is that it has character. Guitar Hero 3 has really neat transitions between "levels" that are animated and tell the story of your band as you get more popular. I realize that Rock Band emulates this a bit in band mode when you travel from city to city, but having some flavor other than the game in Rock Band would have been nice. Playing with my brother in a band and chatting like we're actually in a band between sets has made up for this somewhat, but this leads me to my next point.

I realize that it seems odd to say this, but I would really like to play band mode solo, without having to play guitar and sing. Sure, it's supposed to be for multiple players, but up until Pat came to play with me, I had nobody to play with in band mode. And band mode is wildly different from solo play. It would be nice to get through those parts of the game without having to have another willing person nearby. (Yes, I've been forcing all of my holiday visitors to play with me.)

One thing that drives me crazy about Rock Band is that the 360 won't let me easily move my Live profile between instruments. So if I tired of playing drums, I can't easily switch my profile to a guitar. I have to log out of Live, then log back in under the new instrument. This doesn't seem like much of a problem, but it definitely puts a stall in gameplay, and I'm sure all of my Live friends are tired of being alerted every time I switch instruments. (Live pops up an alert to tell you whenever a friend comes online.)

Another issue with Rock Band and profiles is that when you've created a band, your leader must be present to play. That means that it's really your leader who is progressing through the game. If you had all of your members but that guy, then you would have to start over. Plus, if you only have a couple of players to start out and you want to switch bandmates, the leader can only ever play the instrument they first select. This is a real problem with Rock Band.

My only real complaint about Guitar Hero is in the song selection, and I can't complain about that too much because that's what Guitar Hero is all about. The songs are more heavy and metal-oriented. That's fine, but I like the selection that Rock Band offers that isn't so heavy all the time. Although less Weezer would be nice.

The Rock Band music scrolling bar thing has better graphics than Guitar Hero does, too. They're more consistent. It's a bit harder to tell what all the symbols are for in Guitar Hero. Does the lighted circle mean star power or hammer on? And all the little extra symbols in battle mode are silly. Battle mode is silly.

Another thing that could be improved is the hardware. Beyond the "not working" issues, it would be great to have a completely wireless setup. There are just too many darn wires everywhere.

If you're going to have wires, then provide a better USB hub. It's great that they provided one at all, but it would have been better if it integrated better with the 360. Mine hangs out of the front of my entertainment center now because of how I've had to supply power to it. You would what would be neat? A drum kit that has a built-in USB hub. Plug your guitars into the drum kit. That would be nice.

I hope that the franchise does well, because I would really like to see another Rock Band release that perhaps addresses some of the issues here, and incorporates more of the character of Guitar Hero.