Ish

There's the Windows Media SDK that lets you embed Media Player in your form amongst other things. Its broken into a bunch of SDKs which are described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwmt/html/wmsdk.asp?frame=true Or there's Managed DirectX that contains a really handy and easy to use AudioVideoPlayer library: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/default.asp?contentid=28000410

It sounds to me like you've got a basically hierarchical set of containers and items within those containers (items can be containers themselves). For example: a world, bases in that world, items in those bases, people in those bases, etc. Rather than a database I'd suggest using an XML document as your 'development' save file. I've found this to be useful for two reasons: 1) Its human readable and easily tweakable by hand to test different scenarious. 2) Its a cinch to convert/write alongside a persistence system that writes to an XML file to a persistence system that writes to a custom binary file and just change the mechanism used based on debug or release modes.

If your based in the UK (or Europe I guess) you can still upgrade for peanuts (£19) until the end of the year: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/visualstudio/