Those looking for a real game to sink hours of (apparently) wasted time into look away now – those thinking “wow, I really want to play the crap out of Fallout 3″ or “I love the pitched online battles of Gears of War 2″ should probably just go away.

You’re In the Movies isn’t going to appeal to you.

Right: now they’ve gone we can get down to business. We assume if you’re still reading this it means you know absolutely nothing about games, nor do you really care to know.

What you do want to know, however, is how to get something in for Christmas day that the whole family can enjoy, that won’t take over lives and is just shallow enough to last a day or two before you get utterly bored of it.

You’re In the Movies ticks all those boxes. With gusto.

Hooking up a little camera to the Xbox 360, you take part in a few mini games – very much akin to those in the Eyetoy games or the myriad bollocks on the Wii – where you are the character on the tellycube itself.

After a few rounds of games, involving up to four players, a trailer is shown for a movie in which your composite image is inserted into the trailer, making you a superhero, fight a giant lizard or be electrocuted by a mad scientist – amongst other things. Once created you can upload these trailers and email them to friends, family, enemies and people you don’t know (we would have demonstrated this had the game not failed so spectacularly to make a trailer anything worth showing – but we assume a less cluttered background would produce better results…)

From a purely critical standpoint and in hecklerspray’s dominant ‘we know all about games’ view, this is not what one would traditionally call a good game. It’s shallow, mindless, offers very little, gets boring quickly and half the time doesn’t even work how it’s supposed to.

But it’s Christmas, so we’re supposed to be nicer about things – plus when you look at it from the right angle it really does have something going for it.

So the composite imagery can be an arse, meaning bodies and faces disappear when they’re not supposed to. So the image itself is grainy at best, especially in high definition on a big TV. So the games are boring, pointless and unfunny. So it won’t keep you playing for more than a few days, and only if you have a go sparingly.

We can take all that on board and simply ignore it, for the fact that the movie trailers which you produce will make you laugh like a complete and total berk. They will amuse anyone who sees them and knows the people in them, in the same way those godforsaken elf videos have been doing the rounds recently.

It’s a simple fact that people like to see themselves or people they know well on the gogglebox, and You’re In the Movies makes that a reality.

Even if it is a bit of a dodgy reality, from a technological standpoint. But hey – you probably won’t have to buy it yourself, and if it makes granny laugh then all is well in the world.

Thing is, most of the people this is aimed at will already own a Wii, in which case they can’t play You’re In the Movies in the first place and they already have a dozen or so far better things to keep the family entertained over Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah/The Holiday Season/Coca Cola Time.

If you’ve got a Xbox 360 and a family though, knock yourself out. Just don’t expect it to keep you going past a couple of drunken family gatherings.