Hulu Minus

I've heard people complain about this since it came out so I decided to test the availability of content on Hulu Plus.

I had 29 items in my queue. By items i mean shows or movies not episodes. So the first season of Arrested Development I have counts as one. Out of the 29 items, 15 are available on Hulu Plus.

The selection is weird. The shows aren't consistent even within channels. For example, I can watch Fox's Bones but not Fringe. I can watch ABC's Cougar Town but not Better With You.

The UI is messed up as well. There is a fixed amount of characters that you can see for the titles of episodes. At the top layer (while browsing) the show title is included. For a show like TDS it appears as (the full title of the show)(colon)(space)(three letter day abbreviation)(comma)(first letter of the month)(ellipses) like this:

"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: Thu, A..."

When selected it shows the episode title without the show title so you have a little more room. This is fine for TDS but the titles for some of the TEDTalks can be quite lengthy.

For example at the top layer you can have: "TEDTalks: Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned Wh..."
When selected it shows: "Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned Whil..." (you lost 10 characters and gained 2)
When selecting it again it shows: "Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned While My ..."(you gained another 5)

There is no way to show the entire title. I had to go to hulu.com to find what it was:
"TEDTalks: Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed"

On the website the title is word wrapped. And that is something they could easily show at the bottom of the picture on either of the "after selected" pages.

Lack of content and UI problems aside. I will say one thing in favor of Hulu Plus, it looks amazing. Not the program but the actual shows. Speedtest usually shows my download speed at around 3Mbps. And I was streaming full HD in seconds. It actually looked better than my cable connection. My cable box is component while my 360 is HDMI. Still, when I watch a video on Inside Xbox it buffers every 10 seconds. I didn't buffer once after the initial loading on hulu and the quality never went down.

If I had never tried it I would have brushed it off as hulu trying to take peoples money. As a person who has tried it, it's starting to appeal to me. Not $8 a month appealing though. Mostly because I use hulu.com so I don't have to watch TV on my TV. I can watch a show while gaming. What they need is a picture in picture mode.

All you need to survive a Zombie Apocalypse is a little duct tape.

As I was playing Case 0 I was thinking "Man, I'm really in the mood to play Dead Rising again'. For some reason I forgot they made a sequel while playing the prologue to the sequel. You play as Chuck Greene. A man that I can only assume hasn't covered any wars at all. He can however build a motorcycle with just duct tape. The game is pretty much a demo for Dead Rising 2. It's short at about 2 hours a playthrough but I did it about 5 times before I finished. Not having a jump kick by default was jarring since it's a go-to move for running around without using up weapons. My second to last playthrough was devoted to rescuing survivors. I thought that collecting all of the survivors would be time consuming and come down to the wire. In fact the opposite occurred. I was waiting around for survivors to become available. None of the achievements were very hard. For $10 I wouldn't have bought it. For $5 it was an okay deal. For $2.50 it was a definite get.

PM:CE:DX:OM:GW:TF:BB:QN:IC

So, if I were to describe Pac-Man I would do so thusly [sic] (this is not a quote). You play as a large yellow ball traveling through a maze eating small yellow balls while ghosts chase you. If you eat a medium yellow ball you can then eat the ghosts (Pac-Man is weird). Pac-Man Championship Edition Deluxe is exactly that and yet is still very new and different from the old games.

If you played the original Pac-Man Championship Edition then you'll recognize a few things that came over from that game. When you eat a piece of fruit the half of the maze on the opposite side resets and changes configuration. You also spark when turning early.

New to this game are the bombs and ghost trains. Bombs save you when you are in a pinch. Sleeping ghosts will be sitting strategically throughout the level when you get near one they will be angered. If no other ghosts are following you they will start following you. If there are ghosts following you the angered will wait for the other ghosts to come near it and the join the ghost train. Eating a power pellet will allow you to eat the train of ghosts. Ghosts in the ghost train will still pursue you when they turn blue. Sleeping ghosts do not get angered while they are blue. Sleeping ghosts can also sometimes carry power pellets. Ghosts with power pellets that are in your train allow you to keep your power meter up longer. You have nine courses and a free mode. you can change the visuals on the maze and the characters individually.

There are several modes:
Score Attack (5 min.) - This is your basic mode. It's similar to championship mode from Pac-Man CE.
Score Attack (10 min.) - Like Score Attack (5 min.) but twice as long.
Ghost Combo - Eat as many ghosts as you can before your power meter depletes. It's 10 min. long and you can stop whenever you want.
Time Trial - You have to eat a certain amount of fruit as fast as possible.
Time Trial (Short) - Like Time Trial but broken up into ten shorter challenges.

12/12a
200/200g

mygamercard.net shut down so no gamerscore pics for now.

Past Affect 2.5 - The DLCening

If you've read many of my posts you know that I have a particular hatred for DLC, most of the time. My recent tweet, however, may lead you to believe the opposite. I did indeed buy all of the DLC (to date) for Mass Effect 2. They were selling at a one day only price of 200 msp each. Combine that's cheaper than Lair of the Shadow Broker sells by itself: 800 msp. So the penny pincher in me caved and I bought them. I hurried to put Mass Effect 2 at the top of my GameQ and surprisingly it was the next to arrive.

Risky Actions

Risk is probably my favorite board game, with Monopoly being a close second. So when I found out they were making a version of Risk for the 360 I rushed to...wait for it to go on sale. And then I decided not to get it because I was out of money. But when it went on sale again I scooped it up. As with all good game updates it has classic Risk hidden in there somewhere. I played it and it's just as good and excruciatingly long, but without all the tiny and sharp army men embedded in your carpet. The campaign is short and is more of an introduction to the characters than a real game. It is pretty funny and very well animated. I was actually surprised that Penny Arcade wasn't involved because the art style reminded me of them.

Update 1: If there was an achievement for 100 dice losses in a row I think I'd have it by now. The computer cheats so much. I have 10 guys you have one guy. Why can't I take your country over?