I played the original Pokemon Red & Blue way back when. If nothing else, this is encouraging me to get out of the house. I’ve made my FitBit step count the last couple of days purely by walking instead of the stationary bike.
I still have a couple thousand Magic the Gathering cards too. I wonder how much they’re worth now…
There is a push for MTG classic right now. I have a couple hundred dollars worth and I gave a ton to my cousin year ago, most of my rates andthat.
Dual lands are worth like seventy to over a hundred each.
It might be better if Nintendo were to drop that lockout to 10 mph or even 5. Because if you’re going over 5 mph, you’re either running, riding as a passenger or operating a motor vehicle.
Another option would be to make everyone acknowledge a message that shows up before the game starts, kind of like with a GPS. “Warning: Playing this game while operating a motor vehicle is dangerous and stupid. We won’t be held responsible if you kill or hurt someone because you weren’t paying attention. When you’re driving a car or truck or any other vehicle, that’s the only thing you’re supposed to be doing. You getting a charizard isn’t as important as not being a moron.”
OK, 2.2 klicks after getting eggs started incubating yesterday morning. The game is intuitive, but if you aren’t looking for something like eggs and an incubator, it doesn’t tell you about them.
I’m a tick from 5th level, and my daughter is right behind me. It keeps locking up on my HTC phone, but loves my wife’s LG, so she’s a catching up quick even though I had an evening’s head start on her.
It’s insane how many people we ran into Saturday night at the park in town. The local war memorials, a spot where three white men were hung for an Indian Massacre (First time ever that happened), a Frederick Douglas riot, the massacre site itself, a couple community buildings, and a couple bridges all within a 2-3 mile walk. Difficult to drive them all, but easy to get half by only walking a couple hundred yards, and if you go straight through instead of through the park it’s not even a couple miles.
I saw some people that looked near dead walking around looking for Pokemon. Now I just have to figure gyms out. And how to get candy.
This ending the debate between decades of government subsidized “Play 60” and other goofy initiatives vs. good old capitalism.
When you go to a gym, you can train if it’s your team, or you can fight to take over if it belongs to another team. I don’t know the subtleties of battle, but the basic is to poke the other pokemon as fast as you can. 
I’ve taken over a couple of gyms, but failed to keep them.
heeheee.
I remember thinking that’s all there was to it back in the day.
For you? Or the mythical cartoon creatures?
Imaginary, not mythical.
I’m a bit long in the tooth to chase mythical monsters.
I installed this on Saturday morning a week ago just after we hit Ocean City, MD for vacation. A week and a half later, 15 levels to the better ~500 ‘caught’ and still only seen 68 unique types…
I will note that the boardwalk was covered with PokéStops and Gyms… I had to keep trashing stuff from my backpack. And since apparently, the number of folks hunting in an area influences how many of the critters are available for capture, it was the right time to be there.
The interesting idea to me about card games is how we had several waves of CCGs (Collectible Card games) that include or were spawned from Magic: The Gathering. The basic business model is cheap-ish buy-in (a Starter Deck was maybe $20 when the game first came out? Looks like the modern one is about $10) but allow for ‘popcorn’ buying where you might as well attach a vacuum hose to your wallet to get boosters at a price kids could afford under the parental radar.
Rarity is a thing, so you might have to open countless packs to get a specific card.
The responses to this system were many: Fans with money (Usually adults when I was a teenager and M:tG was new) would just buy entire boxes of cards to raise their chances. Stores started selling singles: Like used books, records, etc. they’d pay pennies for card collections and such (and buy those boxes of new cards) to get the rare cards and dump the rest for practically nothing.
This led to a boom.bust cycle that has probably occurred a few times. In the mid 90s, I feel like every RPG company and any remotely popular sci-fi/fantasy property got a CCG. Most died and are practically unremembered. TSR, the D&D company, had multiple incompatible games that essentially competed with each other, I think. A number of game stores over-invested and got burned with CCG stock they couldn’t sell.
So anyway, newer companies have switched models a bit, making things like “Living Card Games” that are more focused on letting you buy the whole game (1 or more of every card) to make life easier.
But then another twist occurred. Deckbuilder games
Deckbuilders are a sort of CCG/Board Game hybrid. They’re based on principles from CCGs, but make putting a deck together (I.E. picking the cards to use) actually part of the game, not an isolated activity.
From what I’ve seen, with most deckbuilders you start with a fixed “deck” that miss mostly 5-10 basic cards. Each player has a fixed deck at start of a game, and it’s all in one box. No collectible component. You play a sort of ‘mini-M:tG’ but with the added bonus of being to add/remove cards from your deck by various means. As you cycle through you’re replacing the crap basic cards with better cards that generate more resources, add special abilities, and make accomplishing the game’s winning objective easier.
Deckbuilders are an interesting evolution. They make what started as something of a side-part of the CCG “ecosystem” a full-fledged part of the game while at the same time making ‘net decks’ less of a thing: Net-decks were the debated and reviewed online decks, and were seen as something of a shortcut to be competitive.
Although I’ve perhaps wandered off-topic a bit. Pokemon is weird as it was a sort of multi-media thing. CCG, cartoon, and video game share settings and such, but they’re not really the same mechanics. Just three different ways to make animal fighting rings child-friendly. 
I think it’s interesting that the articles about the girl who found the dead body playing Pokemon Go seem to blame the game for it…
Wasn’t the dead body there one way or the other? How is this a horrible news story about Pokemon Go?
Yeah, if anything it’s kind of amazing that the body was found, at least.
Though I do like the way most of these stories are coming out is, look what the stupid person did, not look what the game made them do.
I caught a Pikachu today!
How long before you can evolve him into Raichu?
A loooong time unless I find a bunch more. It takes 50 pikachu candies to evolve him, and I only have one.
But do you really want to evolve him? Ash’s Pikachu seemed to do just fine the way he was. 
I want to keep one and evolve one. The solution? I need to find more.
I just hit level 20 a few minutes ago. That is apparently the level where you gain all of the abilities and special stuff that you’re going to get.
Ah what a difference 11 days makes. 