Rating Pending

I just got done with Jeanne D’Arc for the PSP. Well, i should clarify. I BEAT it about 3 weeks ago, but there is a bit of gameplay to be had after you beat it, and i was playing with that. I DECIDED three days ago that i was done. I tried pretty hard to level my characters enough such that i could beat the extra Colosseum levels, but the play style i chose for the normal part of the game just didn’t work for some of the colosseum levels.

I don’t think i play strategy games correctly. I think maybe i don’t like them. I know i don’t really care for RTS games, but i’ve always had fun with turn based strategy games. FF Tactics and Disgaea were tons of fun. The problem i have with them is that i don’t see how any RTS games are different. Warcraft is the same as Total Annihilation is the same as Starcraft is the same as you get the idea. this definitely hinder my ability to enjoy them. The biggest issue with not seeing the differences is that i play them all the same way, and so i’m always just playing the same game. I don’t know if that’s my fault or it’s the fault of the game designers…

Anyways, the way i play all strategy games is with brute force. If my units aren’t tough enough to kill the baddies, i don’t go find the kryptonite unit for what i’m up against, i just make more of the unit i’ve already committed myself to. Maybe i should read some strategy before i play my next strategy game. I bet that would make it a lot more fun.

I was over at the NAB Show on Monday, and one of the booths I spent a good bit of time at was Adobe. They showed a demo of some kind of new flash web UI tool that was all drag and drop (no coding required) and that looked very cool. Web developers have it too easy.

But what impressed me a lot was the Flash Media Server 2.5 demo. They showed Hulu.com, which I had checked out about 6 months ago when they were in beta (and wasn’t really impressed). It has come a long ways, and it is really quite cool now. It’s literally TV on the internet. You can watch tv episodes and movies (uncut, apparently), and they splice in a few 15 second advertisements here and there. They’ve also got HD (you can get there by clicking the “HD Gallery” link at the very bottom of their page. I’m guessing NBC.com has done stuff LIKE this, but it’s really nice to have a one stop shop. I want everything to be really easy, and Hulu makes it that way.

Ok, so Adobe was also doing some nifty stuff with H.264. Namely, streaming a live feed. Up until now, I didn’t think it was possible to stream an H.264 flv if it wasn’t closed for write (there are some header issues to deal with when the file is closed). I’d like to find out how they did that… More homework, I suppose.