By Nelson Schneider - 07/17/16 at 02:44 PM CT
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or are one of those extra ‘special’ isolationists who live in Montana specifically because the state has no infrastructure, you’ve no doubt heard about “Pokemon GO,” the mobile team-up between Nintendo’s Pokemon Company and Google’s Niantic. This new mobile game microtransaction engine completely blew-up during its first week of general availability in the United States, rocketing to the top of every metric chart that matters (and even ones that don’t matter) as people have flooded into public places in search of Pokemon to catch and Poke-Stops to refresh their supplies of pokeballs.
“Pokemon GO” has been such a wildly viral success that it has even been picked-up as a topic by both world and local TV news broadcasts, which never normally happens until months after the fact for stories involving electronic entertainment. The question still remains, though, is “Pokemon GO” anything to actually get excited about?
If you live in a highly urban area and love walking around for hours on end, then sure, “Pokemon GO” might provide you some entertainment. Likewise, if you are an Urban Whale with hundreds of thousands of dollars in literally disposable income (as in, you actually light cigars with $100 bills and ‘make it rain’ everywhere you go), you might get some enjoyment out of buying your way into the top position at every Pokemon Gym you happen to pass.
For the rest of us, “Pokemon GO” is a very iffy piece of ‘entertainment,’ and is missing a lot of the features that made the original ‘Pokemon’ games such an enduring formula (that The Pokemon Company keeps remaking every few years).
You see, “Pokemon GO” isn’t a particularly new or innovative idea. In reality, the game microtransaction engine is just a thinly-veiled re-skin of Niantic’s “Ingress,” which is, itself, a thinly-veiled way of ‘gamifying’ and crowdsourcing the location of landmarks, public art, and gathering places in Google Maps. “Pokemon GO” does mix-up the “Ingress” formula a tiny bit, and is actually significantly less arduous to play as a result.
For those who don’t know, “Ingress” was all about capturing key points on Google Maps for your team (Green or Blue). Captured points could be linked together via straight lines, provided those lines didn’t cross any other lines already in place. Linking together three points on the map would create a field, which would significantly improve the blablabla whatever of the team that held it. The whole thing was just a big PvP sausagefest that required players victims to maintain a patrol route in order to keep their captured points captured and maintain their defenses.
“Pokemon GO” simplifies the process significantly. Each point of interest is now either a simple Poke-Stop or a Pokemon Gym. Poke-Stops allow traveling Poke-Masters in training to spin an icon to receive a random allotment of free goodies ranging from pokeballs for catching Pokemon to potions and revives to keep captured monsters in fighting form after a defeat at an enemy Gym. Pokemon Gyms are now the only places where PvP happens. Friendly Gyms can host sparring matches to improve the Gym’s defensive capabilities, while enemy Gyms can be challenged in order to change their team affiliation (“Pokemon GO” has three colored teams compared to “Ingress’” two). Linking locations is gone. Forming fields is gone. Thus, the burden of playing “Pokemon GO” is significantly less than the burden of maintaining an Ingress account.
In place of the more irksome systems from “Ingress” that were scrapped, “Pokemon GO” features the ability to encounter and capture wild Pokemon everywhere and anywhere… at least that’s what Niantic and The Pokemon Company want us to believe. In reality, wild Pokemon are a decidedly urban phenomenon (even for pokemon that aren’t made out of industrial waste), despite the franchise’s mythology of Pokemon living in all sorts of decidedly uncivilized places, like forests and caves.
As I shared last year, I don’t exactly live in a high-population density area with great infrastructure. In fact, last month I finally rid myself and my farm of the twin plagues of Windstream (delenda est) and Verizon (of the Zero Bars) in exchange for a U.S. Cellular account with home phone connection. U.S. Cellular advertises that they ‘have more bars in more places’ and that they work ‘in the middle of anywhere,’ which is good, because that’s where I live and spend most of my time. Thanks to U.S. Cellular, I actually have between 1 and 3 bars of cell service on the farm for the first time since smartphones have existed… But unfortunately for my half-hearted attempts at playing “Pokemon GO” at home, there are ZERO wild pokemon inhabiting the countryside. If I want to catch any pokemon, I have to drive 4 miles to Ceresco, NE, which is home to two Gyms and 6 Poke-Stops or 10 miles to Wahoo, NE, which has even more Gyms and Stops. For comparison, a slow-speed drive down Main Street in any small, rural Nebraska town will result in a large number of wild pokemon encounters within minutes. On the other hand, a half-hour walk up and down waterways and through fields resulted in lots of heat and sweatiness, but no pokemon.
Because wild pokemon encounters – which are decidedly THE reason to play “Pokemon GO” for everyone who isn’t an Urban Whale willing to pay their way to the tops of Gyms – are so focused in towns, Niantic and The Pokemon Company really screwed-up an opportunity to create a time-filler for long, boring car rides. The stereotype that traveling with children is horrific is true, as the little beasts need something to keep them distracted from the geologic amounts of time that traveling anywhere seems to take in the perspective of a young brain. It would have been fantastic if every highway, interstate, and side street was filled with wild pokemon to keep young travelers placated, but that simply isn’t the case. This past week, I had the dubious privilege of being a passenger on a trip to a small town in Western Iowa. While every podunk location between home and the destination did have Poke-Stops and Gyms, the space between them was practically barren.
I haven’t even addressed the game’s microtransaction engine’s technical issues yet. Niantic has been desperately struggling to keep the servers running under unpredicted popularity, resulting in an app that can sometimes lose data or become unresponsive. I’ve lost more than one pokemon capture due to the app freezing right as the pokeball clicked shut. Perhaps the worst issue I’ve had with the app is how finicky it is when switching between cell towers and tiers of service. Traveling through semi-rural Nebraska and Iowa is a sketchy proposition for cell service, and it is common to waver between a strong 4GLTE signal on hilltops to a weaker 3G signal to an abysmal 1X signal within the span of a few minutes. “Pokemon GO” doesn’t like this, and can’t adapt, instead resorting to an infinite loading animation with no actual data being loaded until the app receives a manual restart.
Let’s sum up: What does “Pokemon GO” provide? Well, it’s a less competitive take on “Ingress’” location-based gameplay. PvP is completely optional (and should be avoided until approximately player level 20, based on the outrageous power I’ve seen on podunk rural Gym pokemon), and the main gimmick of “Gotta Catch ‘em All!” is back in full force, though the number of pokemon in “Pokemon GO’s” PokeDex is only a fraction of the complete PokeDex. Compared to a traditional handheld ‘Pokemon’ game, “Pokemon GO” is missing a LOT of features, such as trading monsters and battling against friends. Maybe these things will be added at some point in the future, maybe not. For those whose location is off the beaten path, “Pokemon GO” might as well be a paperweight for its non-urban entertainment value, though it can still be a mildly entertaining distraction while riding as a passenger through an urban hub, no matter how small.
