45 replies to this topic

[Sir Turtlelot]

So I see that a few of you have already mentioned this on the Facebook group, but who else has downloaded it? Even though it's still in beta, it's been fairly fun so far, I can easily see myself losing a lot of time in this later on.

 

So far I have:

 

Charmander

Pidgeotto

Eevee

Venomoth

Spearow

Rattata

Weedle

 

 

I came across a Wartortle earlier this morning, but I wasn't able to catch it.  :c

[JRPomazon]

I've been catching whatever I can, hoping to get enough so I can start evolving guys. I have a:

 

Squirtle

Hypno

Gastly

Pigeotto

Oddish

Seel

Rattata

Charmander

Rhyhorn

Spearow

 

and some other guys I can't recall

 

Have to keep catching so I can evolve some dudes

[Jasi]

I can't get it going because the servers are overloaded

[Delphi]

I'm in the same boat as Jasi and I have a sad because of it.

[FalconZero]

*has retired from Pokemon a long time ago*

 

I don't play it but I heard of it from a few friends who started playing the game. I don't think I'll download it... I had enough of battling, catching and training in my lifetime. My old master champ party will always be with me.

[Jasi]

Alright I'm on! I'm MeganLovesSushi. Is there some kind of friend feature?

[Chukchi Husky]

I won't be able to play it. I live in an area where it hasn't come out and I don't have a compatible device.

[Jasi]

omg I'm addicted y'all. Also some footage from my park: https://twitter.com/...880130566455296

 

[Masamune]

I ran out of pokeballs and refuse to pay for some more. Hoping to run across some PokeSpots here and there, since there's really none around my apartments unless I want to walk across four lanes of traffic. Shame since I was doing so well, too!

[wisp]

I wasn't going to play, but I've been hearing stories and seeing pictures that looked really endearing, so I decided to at least install it and see what it was like. I haven't had any luck playing it yet, though. With being a remote employee working at home, I don't get out very much in the first place... and then I went to the store yesterday and it told me there was one literally right in front of me, but it wouldn't show up so I assume it was already gone? And when I let the app turn on my camera to try to locate and capture it, it was telling me it couldn't determine the position of my phone, asking me to turn off the AR (which is the entire appeal of playing it as an app rather than just playing the regular game on my 3DS), losing GPS signal, etc. Basically it just seems really glitchy so far. 

 

So far it's showed me 3 PokeSpots on my map, and all of them are churches. XD I was actually kind of surprised that Walmart wasn't one since that's always been the only place in town where I could find a Nintendo Zone (pretty sure those are supposed to be at Best Buy, but ours didn't seem to be one).

[Jasi]

It's pretty glitchy but I'm digging it anyway. A restart of the app fixes most problems... unless I can't log in because of server overload after it restarts!

[Jasi]

okay learn from my mistakes: have no loyalty to your pokemon, don't level them up unless you're like right now gonna go into battle. I keep wasting my stardust only to catch a bigger pokemon as I level up. 

[Veteran]

Am in state of perpetual annoyance until this launches here. In fact, I might sue the Pokemon Company for future diabetes as I'm not getting enough exercise with no Pokemon to capture.

[Wolf O'Donnell]

So, after everybody's downloaded this app and everybody is tracked 24-7 by the CIA, Nintiac, Google, Nintendo, what then?

[Jasi]

meh

[Delphi]

They can have fun watching me be really boring in the middle of nowhere Utah. Unless it's spying on me naked, I really don't get clanked up about the peeking at phone activity. I don't know why.

[wisp]

I suspect that if they're using Pokemon Go for spying on us, other popular apps are probably already doing it anyway. XD That doesn't make me more okay with it, but I feel like I'm relatively powerless either way. Plus I heard an idea about it that made sense to me - tracking people through this app could actually end up clouding up any meaningful location data since it will add a great deal of basically useless noise from people deviating from their norm while wandering around looking for Pokemon. XD

[Oberon Storm]

Soooo... Really it's just a mobile skeeball RPG?

[SteveT]

...

 

Yes.

[Masamune]

I've seen people suggesting you play the basketball game on Facebook to help practice at throwing Pokeballs. So... yeah.

[Sir Turtlelot]

Alright, so my current collection now includes:

 

Charmander

Venomoth

Raticate

Bellsprout

Pidgeot

Spearow

Eevee

Caterpie

Slowpoke

Oddish

Both Nidorans

Pikachu

Kakuna

Zubat

 

 

So has anyone been to a gym yet? I've been too lazy to actually go to any of the ones nearby, but I am curious as to how they function.

[Veteran]

At last! It launched here today.

I walked around. Wasted thousands of balls on Zubats. Missed an Eevee due to crashing. There's a gym a few hundred yards away from my house that will be mine eventually (don't know how they work, I'm level 4).

Life is good.

[Veteran]

I'm just gonna leave this here.

 

 

[Doctor Pogo]

We've been playing since Friday. At first, when we were in a 'hip' town and Pokemon were all over the place, it was really fun; and then I discovered that where we live, where it is perpetually 1998, the Pokemon seem to have never settled here in any numbers. At one point I had the game open and was actively playing it, looking at it and walking around the parking lot at my show, for ten whole minutes in which absolutely nothing happened, which to me is a nearly unforgivable sin for a game. I knew I could walk around my neighborhood and expect a similar result. It made me so mad I was going to delete it, but for some reason I put it off, then opened it instead later on, and lucked upon a few Pokemon I didn't have yet while I was walking around after the show having a chat with a friend. I was pretty excited to get them, which I didn't expect, so I decided to give it another try, or at least an experiment.

 

The experiment was to play it while I was shopping earlier today, and lo and behold the local Super Wal-Mart was as densely populated as our neighborhood was empty. And it made the shopping trip considerably more interesting and a little stranger. So I figured out a way I could enjoy it, and after a little more wandering around, at this point I like it enough that I looked up the answers to some of my questions about gameplay on the internet, and spent some of my free Google Play money on some more pokeballs and some lucky eggs.

 

This is the first Pokemon game I've ever played, and I've never played the card game or seen the anime. I know nothing of the lore, don't know who any of the characters are, and so far it's been pretty easy to get enough of the idea to just shrug and go with it. I played some Ingress for a while a couple years ago and this is basically a streamlined and rethemed version of that game, which replaces its convoluted mess of links and fields and portals with laser defense modules with simple one-stop gyms and pokestops, which makes it a less team-based experience but way better on the ground without all the tromping back and forth to build and maintain your links. And there are cute weird animal things you can stumble on in this kind of easter egg hunt with a lawn darts minigame. I wish I could choose to skip the animations if I wanted to: the capture animation has a few too many still beats, and the evolution animation is waaay too long for something you have to repeat every single time.

 

I'm on the same team as I was in Ingress, the blue team. I also noticed that this game deflects the 'turf war' aspects of the other a little by focusing on single gyms rather than large multipoint fields, and by having more than two factions. It should probably have more than three, so gang power is even harder to develop, but three is definitely an improvement.

 

I have a lot of problems with the app. It's clunkier than Ingress despite being several years newer, it crashes far too often and the moment it tends to crash is the single most infuriating moment it could possibly choose, the interface is unintuitive to me, there's no help guide, the pokemon look great but all the other art is not that great and some of the design work seems just plain unfinished. And my model of phone seems to break the AR mode AND the Pokedex, so I'm missing two entire features, one of which is one of the things people seem to be enjoying the most.

 

But except for the AR mode problem, which seems to be because my phone doesn't have a gyroscope, I'm pretty confident a lot of that stuff's going to get patched before terribly long, and if it stays popular I would expect a game like this to change in very interesting ways along with new technology.

 

TL;DR: I have justifiable reasons to not like it but I like it anyway. GO BLUE

[Jasi]

The lack of good help guides is ridiculous! There's a crazy amount of misinformation out there.

 

Like, I thought you had to keep a gym for 20 hours in order to collect Pokecoins. But that's NOT TRUE, even though that's what everyone online keeps saying!! As soon as you put a Pokemon in a gym, you can go to the shop and in the top right click "collect" and get your Pokecoins. The thing is that you can only collect once every 20 hours, and the amount you collect is based on the number of gyms you currently have Pokemon in. Now that I found that out I feel like I finally understand gyms. 

[Selena]

I've never played Pokemon, but I must say the complaining about this game from (most) older people and non-nerds is ridiculous. The game encourages people to go outside, exercise, and maybe even interact with others more. The fact that it's not baseball or work or a dedicated fitness regimen shouldn't matter. Not everyone likes those conventional forms of socializing or exercise. Just.... chill.

[SteveT]

It just goes to show, it's not about wanting kids to spend more time outside.  It's about wanting kids to have the same interests as them.

[Jasi]

I've never played Pokemon, but I must say the complaining about this game from (most) older people and non-nerds is ridiculous. The game encourages people to go outside, exercise, and maybe even interact with others more. The fact that it's not baseball or work or a dedicated fitness regimen shouldn't matter. Not everyone likes those conventional forms of socializing or exercise. Just.... chill.

 

that one jerk friend of mine I keep complaining about was calling it a Brave New World dystopian thing, and mocking us for needing our dopamine hits. Oh yes I've forgotten how you evolved beyond the desire for dopamine in your brain chemistry. And of course Fallout or whatever is soooo different. 

[Delphi]

Pfft has he even read Brave New World? Encouraging walking around and providing the game for free with option microtransations isn't exactly the MO of the government in the book. Now if the game encouraged kids to start touching each other erotically for more coins THEN he might have a case!

Uncultured swine! *Shakes fist*

[wisp]

But Fallout is mature, and Pokemon is childish, duh. XD

 

I really fail to understand why people have a burning need to look down on adults who enjoy kid-friendly entertainment.  

 

(Also, ugh, our city IS stuck in 1998, isn't it? )