For the longest time, if you were a fan of Pokemon, you wanted to mix the fantasy of that world with your everyday reality. Spending the days exploring, catching and training Pokemon. Well, fi you wanted to have a taste of how that would be like, Nintendo teamed up with a few different companies to release a mobile game called Pokemon GO, and it has taken people by storm. The immense attention that this app has gotten lead to me wanting try it out for myself, and I wanted to share my thoughts and impressions of this pretty ambitious software.
Begrudgingly, my first few experiences with the app were not the best. Immediately upon installing the game, I wanted to try it out, but the servers were down, and the website for creating accounts was on hold due to maintenance issues. Then after that I had issues connecting my GPS with the game. After all that was said and done, I finally got to use the app itself. Weirdly enough, I decided to go out at midnight to see how this app worked, it was both a scary and thrilling experience. Ultimately, this lead me to see what the hype was about, and why it was so addicting. It made me experience places I walk to all the time in a new and exciting way.
Regardless of the fairly negative first moments, it was well worth pushing past all of it. Pokemon GO has been one of the coolest and most interesting social experience I've had to pleasure to be a part of. The game does one thing that many in the past failed to do plenty of times over, and that's having people interact with each other. It's encouraging a huge number of people to go out and explore their surroundings, and through that, people have started seeing others who are doing the same. There has been many times when I've been at a Pokestop, and someone would come up and smile, having both our phones out, asking "Pokemon?" while the other would nod. Starting a conversation that would have otherwise not have happened. Now, as cool as this game is to me as it is now there are quite a few issues that can even prevent others from playing the game.
Some of the biggest issues come from it's biggest strength, just how many people are playing at a time. This has lead for a large amount of server issues. People outright weren't able to use the app once they downloaded it. Another issue is how hard it is to play this app if you don't have a powerful, up to date phone. The game is free to download for whatever smart phone can access it, but it can come at a severe price for less advanced phones. Friends, and myself included, find ourselves constantly having to reset the game because the app would freeze, or slow down considerably. Hopefully, as the companies involved sees the demand is hitting all over the spectrum, they can address these issues with options of lowering the quality so that people can use it on older phones, or even working on getting a more powerful server to handle all the business this game generates.
The problem that this game generates at this current time is almost laughable to me for someone who sees how amazing the impact this game has had in the first few weeks of it's release. There has already been talk about what's to come for the future of this app, and I'm fully excited to see the fun additions it may provide for us. Seriously, if you haven't at least tried this game out yourself, it's definitely worth looking into. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go capture the abundance of Zubats on my block. Somethings never change.
