Pokemon Go mobile game prompts safety concerns

With more competitive features, perhaps it isn’t too far of a stretch then to anticipate Pokemon Go to become a part of the Pokemon World Championships in the future! As you click on the Pokemon to try catch it, the app turns on your smartphone’s camera and suddenly you see the Pokemon in the real world, the dream of Pokemon fans for decades. Because of Pokemon Go being overloaded with players, everyone is having difficulty loading Pokemon Go Pokestops locations and Pokemonn Go Gyms locations in the game as it gets stuck loading.

People all over the world have been playing the free-to-play augmented reality game and posting all about their Pokemon adventures.

The blue circles represent the portals in Ingress, and these are your Pokemon Go Pokestops and Pokemon Go Gyms locations. John Hanke, the founder of Niantic Labs (the developers of the game), comes from a background of MMO games, and is treating Pokemon Go as such. As a member of a controlling gym, you can leave one of the Pokemon from your party there to help defend the gym from any insurgent forces. If you’re trying to overthrow an existing team, you’ll have to battle all the existing Pokemon inside. The game is awesome and everyone’s loving it, but it’s available on iOS and Android only.

Like the Pokemon franchise that hit in the late 1990s, the goal is to find and capture the cartoon creatures, which can be upgraded and pitted against each other.

According to Internet data analytics site SimilarWeb, Pokemon Go is set to overtake Twitter in terms of Daily Active Users within the next few days.

Pokemon Go appears to be an instant hit, even with its limited release.

The success of the game has also caused Nintendo’s shares to surge in the last week, with the company adding US$7.5 billion (S$10.13 billion) to its market value on Monday (July 11).

Following the initial launch of the game, glitches are to be expected, but aside from the usual technical teething problems, Pokemon GO offers a unique experience unlike any other mobile game.

What is with the armed robberies and dead bodies?

The game has already led a 19-year-old girl in Wyoming to discover a dead body floating in a river. And despite its popularity, the Angry Birds never really had the type of massive and global name recognition possessed by Pokemon. You can also obtain these through in-game purchases or by visiting “Pokestops”.

The app places players on a map as avatars that moves on the screen as they do, in real time. This means you don’t need to go into a stranger’s garden/car/personal space to retrieve a Pikachu. Anecdotally, it’s the only mobile game I can ever remember taking such a hold of my friends, whom you wouldn’t consider to be “gamers”.

In fact, some people are even playing “Pokemon Go” while driving in order to catch a Pokemon.

Catching Pokemon is great and all, but the real side-delight here is that “Pokemon Go” makes for a great if unintended tourism tool for the city of Philadelphia.