EA has announced the winner of its Sim Shorts competition. The company invited budding machinima makers to create short films using the tools included with the PC release of Sims 2. The saucy comedy, "Wild Christmas", by David Cresswell took the honours and will now been shown in cinemas throughout the UK from february 2.
"Wild Christmas is a 2 ½ minute short created using the video capturing tools inherent in EA's massively popular The Sims™ 2 computer game. The film is a romantic comedy with a festive twist where a cheating man talks his way out of a sticky Christmas Eve situation involving a naked woman in a hot tub by using the family dog as an alibi."
I enjoyed Cresswell's short, but I still feel that machinima is at its best when commenting on the videogame medium, rather than using it for wider narratives. Nothing has really impacted quite as forcefully as Red vs Blue and I love Coca Cola's GTA parody. Okay, Male Restroom Etiquette is very funny and works with rather than against the restrictions of the Sims graphics, but then, in its study of neurotic male behaviour it exists within similar territory as the best inward-looking machinima.
I wonder if PS3 - with its hard drive, its Linux OS and Sony's keen interest in user-generated content - can become a new mainstream forum for videogame movie making?
