Pokmemon Go! ...er, Yield.

Undoubtedly, by now you have seen the hoards of twenty- to thirty-somethings running around your local shops, malls, and neighborhood looking for digitized pocket monsters. This rant is about my experiences with the game so far with many links that explain things about it/how to play it.

Pokemon Go is a Augmented Reality (AR) game based on the cartoon of days of yore (see: late 90s). If you're not sure what that means, stop now because you won't get into this--Pokemon Go is all about the brand, Pokemon. If you didn't like it when you were ten, you won't like it now.

If you decide to play it, register first on the Pokemon Website. DO NOT LINK IT TO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT (there's all sorts of scary tracking stuff in the fine print if you do that). Look at the left side-bar thing to "Join." Once you've done that, on your phone, the game is a free app for both apple and android users.

I held out for the first two weeks in playing this game as I assumed it was designed for children--Not so! Again, whether it was intended to be or not (probably it was), this game has mostly appealed to my age demographic. So, when literally all of my friends began to get ahead, I felt the squashing ranks of peer-pressure and downloaded the damned game.

The following day, the "Three Step Glitch" as it is now known to be called began. Basically, it makes it so that instead of being able to track specific types of Pokemon, now any Pokemon you run into (and hopefully catch) are completely random. (Side note on that link: I wanna be paid Forbes salary to play games and write about them...) This is when the game got much less exciting.

Since then, I've pretty much lucked my way into 28 Pokemon in the Pokedex and reached level 8 yesterday. I'm in no way a "hardcore" player--I turn the app on when I'm in stores with free wifi and when I walk my dog (Yes, I ask the Poke-dog if he'd like to go on a Poke-walk...every time.) One would assume if I lived not out in farm areas, that this would go a lot faster. However, with no Pokestops in (safe) walking distance (there is one four "blocks" down, but there is no sidewalk, I have to walk in people's lawns and did it once and was hollered at).

This Saturday, there was a rather large update and now there are no steps at all for tracking...not that it really made a difference to the problem anyway. What made it more frustrating currently was that I had just figured out where in the vicinity of my neighborhood different "spawn" points were for certain pokemon...and with the update, most of them have changed to different types, and all of them are not spawning as frequently.

It also is very frustrating to see the local Gyms with Pokemon levels (CP) of like 1700 when they highest Pokemon I have at level 8 is about 200, and it would appear I'll need at least five more levels to get that far. Clearly the people that are holding these gyms either ar fanatical walkers, or have no lives and drive around to all the pokestops to get more balls (the main problem in my very rural setting).

I do find that my neighborhood has quite a variety of different Pokemon compared to more urban areas. However, we have zero water ones and most of the streams and lakes nearby don't show up on the maps. Those that do, I haven't ever run into water pokemon near anyway.

So, for now, Pokemon is slow-going. I'm not going to stop playing (again, peer-pressure), but I do hope in the next update they'll have the tracking sorted out and I'll make greater progress rather than finding 200 Nicoran.