Or How I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Pokemon Go:
Wow. Where to start here….
So I was one of the crazy people who played Ingress, the precursor to Pokemon Go. It was a fun game about taking bases, supporting your “team” and walking about a lot. It was good but not what I would call true “augmented reality”. More messing about with maps.
Or was it?
Ingress was a real game!
At first, Ingress feels like just strolling around and finding random junk before getting inevitably splatted by a much higher level player once you claim some territory.
The problem was that when I joined the game, it had already been around a long time and a newbie just couldn’t compete in an augmented reality populated by supermen.
So I threw in the towel…
I jacked it in. Ingress had left me cold and for a long time I abandoned the hope of finding an augmented reality game I could get in to.
Then came Pokemon Go.
It was everything I loved about Ingress, but with Pokemon in (the real ones from Red and Blue, not the weird menagerie of new ones)! And better yet, I was an early adopter. Surely everything would be awesome?
No. Not everything would be awesome
That monetisation!
Those catch rates!
The radar working, then not, then working, then not….!
The immediate rush of power players crushing all resistance.
Augmented reality stuff is really cool. The gyms having descriptions of the thing they are based in is a nice touch and something inherited from Ingress.
The fact that the community are both really friendly and total jerks? Probably why I am one of those people who prefers my games single player…
