Getting Home Before The Sun Sets and Pikmin Bloom

Getting Home Before The Sun Sets and Pikmin Bloom

Byrichard

At this time of year there is a race between the walker and the sun. Either you must go for a walk earlier in the day or you must be ready to walk after the sun has set. Both of these are possible. The days are getting shorter and the temperatures are getting lower. They are getting low enough for gloves to be tempting. I haven’t worn them yesterday, or today, but yesterday I almost felt the need.


One aspect of Autumn walks is that we walk at the golden hour, so the light is good for pictures, if you are equipped to walk, once the sun has set. I was not, so I continued walking, hoping to get home before it was too dark to see. I did, easily.


Pikmin Bloom is simple. It is an app/game that uses your steps to decide how many flowers you have planted in the AR world. As you go for your daily walk you plant flowers, and as you plant flowers, and as you take steps, you also gestate flowers in pots.


The game is made by Niantic Labs, makers of Ingress, a great game, and Pokemon Go, a game for compulsive OCD people. Can you tell which one I prefer. So far the biggest flaw i see with Pikmin bloom is that it does not count all your steps. It only counts those that are taken as the app is open, or a certain mode is engaged, and that is a shame. With Ingress I would easily have the 2500 kilometre badge, if only it counted all walking, rather than just the walking you do with the app open.


We are not all going for walks, just to play AR games. Some us go for a walk to go for a walk, and if we’re in the mood we may spend a few minutes playing Ingress or other Niantic games. I dislike Pokemon Go because of the random rejection when you try to catch Pokemon Go creatures. It feels too time demanding, to be worth investing in.


I will spend more time playing with Pikmin Bloom. The name is hard to remember. We will see how long I last.

First thoughts on Pokemon Go

First thoughts on Pokemon Go

Byrichard

My first thoughts on Pokemon Go are that we can level up fast. They have taken all of the Ingress Portals that Ingress players and I have created and turned them in to whatever the locations are called in Pokemon Go. I could research the names and terms but I am not that obsessive. Pokemon geeks can let me know in the comments. Is this why they stopped accepting new portals a year ago, to make porting the data from one server to the next easier?

This morning I walked and went from a beginner to level four and a half. I was able to collect many pokeballs and pokemon creatures. Levelling up is easy. You get 100 points per pokecreature and 500 points for every new creature. You can upgrade or evolve individual creatures as you collect the required resources.

One of my favourite features so far is that you can incubate eggs by walking. So far I have eggs that require 2-5km of walking to spawn. This means that you can go for a hike and keep your phone active. Every two to five kilometres a creature will hatch and you can start incubating the next one. This is a nice feature because it implies that we will not be stuck in a city. Walking in the countryside will have the same effect.

The second pleasant aspect is that although there are “portals” as I would call them as an ingress player creatures also spawn all over the place. This means that as a person who spends a lot of time in the countryside I am free to play in a rural setting. One of the reasons for which I stopped playing Ingress was because of the time it took to farm and the need to spend time in towns. With Pokemon Go these challenges are now neutralised.

According to the Tribune de Genève this game is only available in the US and New Zealand for now. As I am part of an early adopter community in this part of Switzerland we have been able to access and test the game ahead of its official European release. The software still has a few bugs, at least on the Sony Xperia Z5 compact that I use.