First thoughts on Pokemon Go

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My first thoughts on Pokemon Go are that we can level up fast.Â They haveÂ 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.Â 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 GenÃ¨ve 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.