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.