Finally beat Cliff

 The title may be a little misleading if you're not a Pokemon Go player, but the short version is that there are the standard critters to catch, and also some enemies in the form of Team Rocket players to beat. It's set up slightly differently to how it goes down in the cartoon series, but the short version is that there are low level enemies referred to as "grunts", mid level ones referred to as leaders and big ones labled as Boss.

(There may be higher level ones, but i haven't encountered them yet).

In order to get to the Boss, one needs to first beat a few leaders - and the first few I was able to beat relatively easily. Today I was able to beat the last of them, after having battled a bunch of times and getting smushed into the ground each time.

It may only be a game, but nice to have a bit of sweet, sweet victory. 

Cult, round two

 Well, first time around I joined the wrong team.

Now on the correct team, still haven't gone out and done a hunt, but managed to hit like level 12 already with almost no effort. Have way too many items so my inventory is full (over-full actually) but hoping to be able to go for a wander this weekend.

Probably while walking the dogs.

Gave in and joined the cult - five years after the fact

 I was never a big fan of it, I avoided it for half a decade but I've given in and started a Pokemon Go account.

Set it up early this morning, then took the doggos out for a walk. It's interesting how it's geared towards "quick rewards" for new players. It was just about giving me a new level for not falling over! Caught a Pokemon? Level up. Swiped a poke-stop? Level up. Went around the corner? Level up.

After one walk this morning:

• Covered 3.8km (about average for our dog walks)
• Took about an hour and 15 minutes (a touch slower, normally we go out for under an hour)
• Collected 43 different types of Pokemon
• Caught 73 individual Pokemon
• Hatched 2 eggs
• And dropped one Pokemon into a gym (which was promptly beaten up within a few hours)

Overall, it's about what I was expecting (my wife has been playing for years). Funnily enough, didn't see a single Rattata!

On the to-do list: learn how to manage inventory and how to pick which critters to keep.

Ingress Prime

 By way of quick introduction for those who are not familiar with it: Ingress Prime is a GPS-based game made by Niantic - the same company that made Pokemon Go (PG). Ingress was their previous game, and is easily summed up as "a world wide game of capture the flag".

Ingress was their original "go out and find virtual stuff" game and it had players from across the world submit locations to be places of interest. Niantic was then able to use that map to create the map for PG and make it the "instant success" that it became.

I started playing Ingress as it uses basically the same map as PG and my wife is a PG player so we could go out and play at the same locations.

What I've found from Ingress after playing for a few weeks is that it's good for exercise, but not so good for playing as a game. Unless you want to dedicate your life to it, and have a large team of players. how it works is that you go out and capture places of interest for your team. You can join the places together and when you join three, the triangle in the middle gets filled in and becomes your teams' "territory".

The more territory you hold, the more points your team gets.

The downside is that the places that you control start "breaking down", and go back to neutral after about a week. You can go and revisit and recharge them to keep them in play, but you need to be visiting them at least every six days or better yet every day. So the more territory you control, the more time you're going to be spending running around doing maintenance. I haven't done the math, but I'm sure there's a limit you'd reach where you'd be spending all your time recharging and have no time to create new ones.

Here's where it is handy to have teams - you can charge each other's territory, and you can focus on controlling larger areas. But that requires coordination and, you know, friends.

At the moment I think I'll be mainly focusing on just doing it on occasion for fun rather than seriously trying to win points. It's a fun thing to do while out jogging around the suburbs, but not something I'm willing to jump into the car and race across town to go collect or protect territory. At the moment (as far as I can tell), there's only about a dozen active players in the Darwin area so there are plenty of neutral points of interest which can be captured and controlled.