Pokemon Go is the newest mobile app sensation but you already knew that. It’s basically a Pokemon reskin of the Ingress app. A couple of years ago, I discovered Ingress. It sounded interesting and I almost tried it but I wasn’t quite clear on the premise and it sounded like it might be too social for me to enjoy. I like the idea of some kind of geocaching type game where you wander around and go to specific locations for... some reason. Now that it’s been injected with Pokemon, I’ve decided to try it. You know that if something that’s popular can get me to care, it must be REALLY popular.
Pokemon Go includes the whole first generation of Pokemon for you to catch. Back in junior high I had Pokemon Red for my clear Gameboy Pocket and I loved it. That was the only Pokemon game I ever played. The next installment to the franchise (Was it Gold and Silver?) was on GBC which I didn’t have and wasn’t going to get so I basically resolved to stop caring about new Pokemon games and I did. I know almost nothing about the other games or other Pokemon. However I still possess a veritable encyclopedic knowledge of the first game as if I’d just hundred percented it yesterday.
The new “game” mostly involves wandering around with phone GPS, finding Pokemon on your radar that you can approach and capture (not by battling) by flicking pokeballs at them on your screen. The mon hover over your phone’s camera feed with a drop shadow to make it look like they’re in the environment. It’s so simple even a “mobile gamer” can do it. There are also Pokestops in specific special places, monuments, churches, some businesses on your map that you can get items like Pokeballs, potions and eggs. There are also gyms you can find where you can battle rival teams, (blue, red, yellow.)
This game feels like it was made for me and yet it doesn’t. The concept is fun and I enjoy Pokemon but instead of a game that I go out and play, it turns out to be a game that I involve myself in as long as it coincides to a reasonable degree with what I’m already doing. The vast majority of Pokemon I’ve caught, have been at home, in the passenger’s seat of the car or at the grocery store. When I load it in my house, there's a brief moment where the GPS doesn't know where I am any puts me somewhere strange on the map. I've caught a few when that happens. I went to the library with my kids which just happened to be in range of two Pokestops which I farmed for items during the entirety of our stay. They refreshed every five minutes at most. If I go to the mailbox or the dumpster, I load the app so I can incubate my eggs as I walk because when you’re an actual parent of small children, you’re basically under house arrest and you need to take advantage of those brief moments where you get to leave in order to accomplish a mundane obligation because while you’re accomplishing that mundane obligation you can periodically check your phone to see if there are any Pokemon nearby.
The radar gives you a vague clue as to how close the nearby Pokemon are. They get a rating of 0-3 paw prints. Zero means they are appearing in your range. Every paw print I think is like 100 meters or something. For me anything above one paw print might as well be on the fucking moon. I can’t make time for this and I can’t just drop everything to heed the call of an adventure at any given moment and deviate from my current trajectory by a half mile to go get a poliwag behind some shady looking bar. Ever since I grew to level 8, the radar has been useless. It says everything is always three paws away. I don’t know why but I suspect it’s part of the app being shitty. I guess it doesn’t matter for a person that has to wait for pokemon to appear in their lap before they take action anyway.
The “game” is fun but not good, if that makes any sense. (I’m not putting it in quotes to be a dick. I legitimately don’t know whether to call it a game or an application. There’s not really an overarching objective and you can’t really lose.) It’s been plagued with server and sign in problems. It too often freezes when you catch something )but thankfully I have yet to lose a catch because of it.) Sometimes it just freezes outright. The UI disappears sometimes which means you just have to reload it. The journal function doesn’t seem to do anything. The pokedex feature is unuseable on my phone. It’s severely glitched in innumerable aspects, one of which is all of the text
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This is the shittiest, most unstable app I’ve ever used aside from the new infernal MLB At Bat app. Man fuck that thing. The one they had before was fantastic. They didn’t need to change anything but they literally changed EVERYTHING and made it unusable in the process. It was like they took a sledgehammer to a Ming vase and left the mess behind calling it a new vase. Anyway, these nasty rough spots on top of the bare bones content make it feel like a beta stage application. That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable though I do suspect it’s going to lose its appeal pretty quick without some significant updates. Also it’s a free app and it’s up to you how much money you want to waste in it so I guess I should just stop bitching.
There are microtransactions where you can buy coins so you can buy items like pokeballs, lures, some kind of inventory upgrade, etc. However you can get all items you need for free by leveling up or visiting pokestops. If you buy microtransactions in ANY game you probably have too much money on your hands or should at least donate your extra money to someone more intelligent but with less money. There’s just something so shitty about buying advantages in games, especially when they let you circumvent playing the game whether it’s to get more Exp or acquire an item. I know you’re not playing phone games for amazing characters, stories and emersion. Why in the fuck are you even bothering with a videogame if you’re not even going to bask in the most basic catharsis of achieving or overcoming a challenge without throwing money at it? To hyperbolize, it’s like buying an Olympic gold medal on Amazon versus winning one. You only care about the end result when the journey there was the actual point. There should be a phone game where you pay money and then it just shows you the credits. That’s what you’re here for, right?
If you’re some kind of purist who only wants a traditional Pokemon game for your phone, you’re not going to enjoy this. It is severely stripped down and dumbed down for mass appeal which is saying something because Pokemon was never exactly complex. Your pokemon only know TWO moves which you have no control over teaching to them. That bit of technique needed to weaken a pokemon as close to KO’d without them fainting to catch them is gone. You “train” or evolve your pokemon from a menu screen by giving them candies or stardust which you get from catching pokemon. People say there’s a nostalgia factor but it seems pretty hollow and manufactured to me. Pokemon was about going on an adventure where you discovered interesting animals in different environments. You set off with your starter who learned and grew before your eyes and became your friend to the end powerhouse guy for fighting. You assembled your team of other pokemon who you chose and molded the way you wanted and thus became very attached to them. In Go you can catch any pokemon in the wild and the average level for them scales up as you, the trainer, level up so it’s like there’s no point in training anything unless you’re moments away from entering a gym. The minute you start investing candies and stardust into leveling a pokemon, you’re sooner or later just going to find a wild one that’s already more powerful and toss out the old one like a less shiny coin in your state quarter collection. It happened with my bulbasaur starter, (not that the concept of a “starter” even exists in Go.) There’s less point in evolving a pokemon because you can just find it’s evolved form in the wild or from an egg and it probably costs too many fucking candies to do it anyway and the candies are specific to breed and are a bitch to accumulate if you’re not doing it for a pidgey or zubat. The whole thing is so devalued and disposable.
This game wasn’t made for people with my forced lifestyle. I can’t play games whenever I want. I need to have a window of opportunity which usually only happens after 10 at night. Not only do I need that rare free time, I also need to be out of the house. I also just moved OUT of the city. I’m level 10 and I’ve never battled at a gym before because there are few of them and they take actual time to do versus catching or going to a pokestop. It’s an event that takes too much planning for me. It sounds pathetic but it’s true, I can’t even participate in one of the main components of the game. I HAVE SO MANY POTIONS AND REVIVES. I guess it doesn’t matter much because I’m always going to be lightyears behind the majority of other players who rule the gyms anyway. So to be frank, Go is fun but it’s more fun for people that aren’t me.
