Pokemon Go

If you've played Pokemon before, you've probably wondered how cool it would be to catch, train, and battle Pokemon in real life, but of course, that will never come true because Pokemon's a video game. But because of some developers at the company of Niantic, we've have gotten something that will probably be the closest thing we'll have to Pokemon in real life. They came out with a game called Pokemon Go which allows you to catch Pokemon in "real life," aka catching Pokemon with an app on your phone by traveling around town to find virtual Pokemon. Using this app, you can catch 150 different types of Pokemon and be able to level them up and battle other Pokemon in gyms scattered around the world.

A great part of this game is that you get a real sense of adventure that you'd normally get when playing the video game because in order to find Pokemon, you actually have travel around in the real world. During the summer, me and my friends walked around Campus and downtown Champaign with the goal of catching more Pokemon, something that I thought I would've never done.

But the absolute best part of this game is the community it formed around the game during the first few weeks of the game. Because I live in a college town, there were a lot of nostalgic college students that played Pokemon as a child. While walking around Campus, there were throngs of people around Pokelures (an item that attracts Pokemon to the spot it was deployed at) that were chatting about Pokemon and interacting with each other. It was so cool to see so many people crowded around each other and bonding over a video game.

But after the first few weeks, the game died and had gone to crap because of the decisions the developers made. Their biggest controversy was when, in trying to fix the Pokemon tracking system, the developers replaced the system with a less effective system. This of course would anger a lot of people because now it is harder for people to find the Pokemon they want and in response to the anger from the community, they decided to just take away the tracking system all together. This didn't ride well with the community and a huge portion of the starting players have stopped playing the game because of it.

I'm super sad that the game had turned out this way and I kind of hoped that the Pokemon Go hype would last until the start of school. There's so much potential for this game that could instantly rein in its original players and entice new ones, like adding more Pokemon, or implement a trading system, all stuff that they had promised at the start but never gotten around to yet. Because of the game's backward developers, the game remains to be a 5/10.