Ryan Goes To IGN Part 2

Wow... what a damn weekend folks. The podcast went off pretty well I thought, and I managed to get everybody nice and buzzed in the process with the booze I brought along. Craig Harris claims he couldn't write anything until after 4 o'clock... probably because he was drinking vodka straight out of the bottle. By the way, you can download the podcast here. It's episode 155.

I can't express enough how awesome Friday was as a whole. A huge thanks goes out to not just the podcast guys, but to everybody over at IGN for making it as awesome as it was. Before the podcast I was given the chance to spend about 20-30 minutes with Final Fantasy XIII and another 30 minutes with Cave Story. Final Fantasy XIII looks absolutely amazing and the combat system was very engaging. It has a very real-time feel to it. The character I was using could queue up 3 actions at once. Below where your actions lined up there was a bar that filled over time. Once that bar was filled your actions would begin, and each action would drain the bar an amount equivalent to the length of that action bar. Now, I say 3 actions could be queued up, but I pretty much only used one attack action in my time, so I have no idea if other actions actually have different lengths and allow you to line up more than 3 at a time. But, it became important to continuously pay attention to the battle, as even if you stop attacking, your enemies do not. I should mention that I didn't get any tutorial, so I'm sure I only scratched the surface. Ryan Clements of IGN gave me a quick rundown of the controls as I was playing. He said it gets incredibly in depth as you progress and obviously he didn't have time to run me through everything, but I was able to win a few battles and had a good time doing it. One thing that was new was the ability to assign one of your characters to take on one job during combat. So, for example, I had a character in my party who was able to heal. I could press L1 (I was playing it on a PS3) and select an option to assign her to heal me throughout the engagement. It definitely came in handy with my high levels of suck.

I saw Greg Miller playing some ModNation Racers. It's a very Mario-Kart-esque PS3 exclusive with fully customizable cars, characters, and tracks. He described it as Mario Kart meets Little Big Planet. It actually looked like a lot of fun and I could definitely see myself picking it up. You can check out Greg's "Deep Dive" here.

Later that evening we all headed out on the town. I'll spare you all the details, but it was a hell of a night.

Anyway, now that that's all over I'll resume my regularly scheduled gaming experience. I'm hoping to get into Battlefield: Bad Company 2 tonight for at least a little bit. I also still have Heavy Rain to work on. I'd better get to it...