A Mesmer Review of Sorts

 Mesmer is an interesting experience from a gameplay and game design perspective. To summarize the experience is tricky but, doable.

The game starts of at seemingly pristine city being cleaned by public people in horse masks. On the surface everything is well in paradise, until I woke up the next morning being forcefully recruited into a revolt by the captain of the ship I took to get here. First I had to start a strike down at the cannery, where a whole school of fish pun people work. Each one has a quest they need me to perform. Sometimes I can bribe them and spinn a wheel to get on their good side. Yes I have pick between a task, or by spinning a wheel with timing. A minigames that can be influenced by all manner of items. Both actions takes time, the one thing I will always run low on. Everything takes a certain amount of time and the clock is always ticking and when it runs out it's game over and I have to do everything all over again. Resource management and scheduling is key. Something I have no problems with, but to someplayersit will be a bit immersion breaking. 

First I caused a strike, but one of the men need permission from his wife, whom I bribed with a sandwich found in a dumpster. The next man wanted me to reclaim his wedding ring from the pawnshop. The over have me the option to either bribe him, pay money, or stealing a crate during the night. A task that required me to dodge the police patrolling the streets at night.

The third cannery worker I simply spun the wheel on and won the argument.

Then I had to ask a rich man for funds, and I had the option to bribe him, but I unfortunately failed that task, so I had to break into a rich house during the night to steal a fancy ruby. Little did i know I needed two lock pics. Let alone that the door was blocked by a sinister mini game and a patrolling policeman. Once inside I was given a series of chooses and a descriptive dialogue on what I was doing and where I could go. 

The various task to perform in the city is numerous and brought me into contact will all kinds of colourful people, from every walk of life. The main core of the gameplay is to do odd jobs. Anything from breaking in. Sneaking around during curfew. Vandalizing public property and performing public speeches to convince the various factions that they should listen to me.

Essentially there is a whole slew of things to do and even more than needs to be done. However it takes a fair bit of trial and error to find the optimal path to victory. One thing mesmer is not doing and that is holding my hand and actions have actual consequences.

All the NPC I have to talk to in Mesmer have a lot to say and they all play an integral part in unearthing the plot. They also comes with a stat that tells me how much they like, or dislike me. Which makes it easier to convince them, instead of doing a mission.

es Mesmer takes place in a fairly large city where no place is off limit, but the police have checkpoints during the day and patrols during the night. Luckily there are tools such as an expandable grapling hook, a hog to ride on, and running around. Most of the time the perspective is seen from above, but a behind camera can be activated to enjoy the colourful scenery.  Sure I can walk around with the camera behind me, but the frame rate is rubbish. Hopefully this will be fixed real soon.

Which brings me to the music, which is quite good and very fitting. From the tranquil title screen song, to the hectic wanted music. All in all, Mesmer is a fun and memorable experience that requires the player to get an intimate knowledge of the town, have a handy list of everything needed, and a gallon of patience. Stick it to the man and bring about the revolution by any means.

Njål Sand

Unfocused much?

 I really really loathe auto focus on web cameras. Yes these wonderful tools of the streaming trade have this feature on by default and it sucks. A very, very common mistake that occurs in most live streams at one point or another. Streamers tend to gleefully ignore this when they are the creative kind. Especially people painting miniatures are often painfully ignorant about how easy it is to disable this function and how terrible anything out of focus looks. Essentially the trick to adjusting anything on the camera is to right click on the source inside obs and select properties from the drop down menu. The popup window has a lot of settings and one of the check boxes is always focus. This setting is utter garbage and will cause a lot of headaches when active. 

The idea is that once you hold an object close to the lens, the camera will focus on that object and blur out anything else. However this setting reacts to pretty much any sort of movement that occurs inside the area the camera can see. This setting is also horribly slow and practically useless in low light environments. This fiction might work better on high end models. However it still takes a second or two for the objective to do its function. And in all honesty, that is something I personally refuse to deal with. I might not have the best equipment, but I know what I do not like, and if it is an issue, I will strive to fix it and improve. Something a lot of humans are utter rubbish at doing. The other thing to adjust on the setting menu is the sharpness. I have no idea why this setting is not maxed out from the get go. Maybe its the software just being careful, or it has to do with longevity. Something I have yet to have issues with. That said the cheaper the camera, the worse the range of settings are.

For people not that familiar with cameras, they have probably noticed that there is this noisy grain once the camera has been scaled up a bit. This is due to the camera not handling low light settings what so ever. The only cure is a better light rig, or a newer and more expensive camera. Something I eventually intend to acquire. Its a bit of a shame that I just cant just use a digital camera for this. My Lumix would be perfect to use as a web camera. That said, perhaps I can scavenge the old camera, give it a plugged in power-source and turn it into a web-camera. By the way, this idea occured to me as I was writing this.

Anyhow that is it for now.

Njål Signing out

#zaceron.

Genchin Impact and my issue with Gacha games

Gacha games are kinda bad, like really, really bad. I've been playing Genshin Impact over on my twitch channel. As a game it is very fun and looks fantastic. With colorful characters, sketchy voice acting, and so anime in style it hurts.

The concept of a gacha game is to entice the player to use money in order to buy bags of in game currency. Then use these virtual money to draw random equipment and heroes from the slot machine. A true and tested formula that is commonly associated with mobile gaming, such as Raid Shadow Legends, Langrisser, and almost every Nutaku game on their site.

The thing that really grinds my gear is how bad and boring the equipment and the drop rate is. Loot is ranked by stars, five, or six is usually the best tier. However the one armed bandit can pick anything between three and five stars. Low star items are practically worthless fodder used to enchant gear. Which is fair enough, however three star stuff is generic vendor trash found in chests and dropped by mobs. Which spoils the fun of actually investing anything but in game resources to hit that lever. I simply hate getting yet another worthless three star pieces of refuse yet again.

The other terrible aspects of this types of games is the grind fest. The upper level always requires an obscene amount of materials, resources, and not to mention time. In the end this process only increases stats in a myriad of ways. Practically every upgrade boost stats and nothing more. For some this is not an issue, for me it is boring and tedious. There is nothing exciting about equipping a new stabbing implement with some virtually unnoticeable passive set bonus.

The other issue is that almost every other game of this nature is a boring turn based game that plays itself. Something these games actually do, by adding an autopilot function, which plays the game for you. Making the game even more pointless to play.

To summaries the basic loop I always undergo in a gapcha game. Play through tutorial, use the resources to get myself some four and five star characters. Then level them up as much as possible. The watch as the new hero plowed through any enemy that stands in the way of progress.

Å game of this nature that breaks from the mold in the gameplay department is

Genshin Ompact. Which combines exploration, action based combat, and a beautiful world to exploit. Combat is fairly simple but very engaging. So far every hero has three abilities. A basic attack that often can be charged up, a special attack that has a cooldown timer, and a super attack that can be used when enough special attacks have been performed. Most damage is negated by using the sprint key to dodge, or by moving to the side. The thing that really spice this up is the elemental synergy. Wet enemies are easy to electrocute, and simple to freeze. While fire can evaporate water and melt ice. Yes, elemental attacks kick ass and I couldn't be more happy.

Ice has one extra benefit outside of combat and that is to freeze water, which allows me to traverse any body of water by freezing the path ahead. Traversing the terrain is done by climbing and glorious gliding. Missions are surprisingly varied and actually entertaining. I did not expect this much variety in mission objectives and exploration. Unfortunately all the treasure chests on the way are filled with low star trash. However I need those to upgrade my adventure level, the one stat that gatekeepers progress. 

The music is fairly chill and does nothing wrong in my ears, I can't say the same for the pint sized thing that follows me around, but that is due to the terrible voice actress pretending to be a little girl with a high pitched voice. Yes the game is fully dubbed and voiced by English voice actors. As mentioned earlier the game is painfully anime for better or worse. I'm fairly sure some of the characters in Genshin would put me on a creep list. Aside from that the plot is okay I suppose and the banter is actually entertaining. All in all I can't complain much outside of the stupid cacha insisting on giving me trash gear way too often.

Zaceron Signing out