Gotta catch 'em all!

I hadn't heard the phrase "Gotta catch 'em all!" before. Now I know what it means.

On July 6th one of my friends posted on Facebook a picture of a Pokemon saying "I guess doing the beta gives you a reward!". Implying that participating in the beta of a game called PokemonGo gave you a free Pokemon. Normally I don't pay attention to those types of games because I have never picked up a game or been interested in anything to do with Pokemon. But something told me to google PokemonGo.

Once I did I found out this was a game that simulated the real world on your Android or IOS phone and in it you could catch Pokemon. The roads are all exactly the same in the game as they are in the real world. You have to physically walk around in the real world and throw these little red and white balls at monsters and catch them. Sounds a little silly but it's actually very fun. There is so much to this game it's a little mind boggling. Wrapping your head around all of the components of the game takes some work, and a little research.

The two main things I love about the game are the social aspect and the physical aspect. This game requires you to get off of your lazy butt and walk around. In the last 3 days I have walked almost 20km. That's a little over 11 miles. It's getting me out into the fresh air and nature. I have seen SO many people walking around playing this game I just can't believe how popular it is. It makes me so happy! This game is going to change a lot of peoples lives. You may laugh and think it's silly but it's already happening right now. There are several meet ups being planned for takeovers of gyms and monster hunting.    

As far as actual game play goes, basically you want to catch as many monsters as you can. In order to do that you have to walk around to find them and once you do, you have to throw a Pokeball at it and catch it. Pokeballs are a finite resource. You can get more but it requires you to either buy it with in-game currency, or you can walk around to locations that are known as Pokestops. It really depends on where are in town as to how often they pop up. Down town area there are a ton, but up in my residential area in SW Portland they are few and far between.

Pokestops are locations of interest in the real world that can be anything from a school, a store, a church, a pot store, a park, a picture on the side of a building.... really anything. It's a predetermined spot made by the game developers, but it's really neat because they have actual real life pictures of the Pokestops in the game. Pokestops are very useful because they can also give you eggs that you can incubate and hatch into monsters that are hard to find in the wild. They also allow you to attach a Lure Module to a Pokestop that lures monsters to your location so you can catch more.

Once you have a plethora of monsters, you need to think about evolving them and powering them up. Every time you catch a monster it gives you pieces of candy which you can feed to other like monsters to evolve them into stronger monsters. You want stronger monsters because while walking around you will run into gyms. Gyms are places you can store some of your monsters and get rewards for placing them there. There are three teams in Pokemon. Yellow, Red, and Blue. Only one type of team can be at a gym at a time, so if your color is not at the gym you have to defeat the monsters there to change it to your color.

There's more to the game and it's a lot more complicated when it comes to evolving monsters because you have to take several components into account when deciding which monsters to evolve. But I don't want to give away everything about the game because figuring stuff out is fun, to me, so I'll leave it with the basics :)