WSS Family: Pokemon GO!
The school holidays have been a lot of fun with a trip to Scienceworks, a few lunches out, movie afternoons and two trips to the Lost Dogs home to help my brother choose a pet cat but do you know what I was up to this afternoon? I was wandering around our estate with the boys catching Pokemons. Yes, really! It has been raining all week, so it was nice to spend the afternoon out in today’s sun.
The boys discovered Pokemon GO and after catching a couple of characters at home yesterday, decided to find some more at certain points around our estate.
The game uses your phone’s camera and GPS to capture, battle, train, and trade virtual Pokémon who appear throughout the real world. Then as you move around the app uses vibrations and a flashing light to alert the player of the presence of a nearby Pokémon.
Pokémon is the second-most successful video game-based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo’s Mario franchise, and now the augmented reality mobile game is available on iOS and Android (Pokemon GO is currently number one in both app stores).
It is kind of like Geocaching (Geocaching is a treasure hunt using a GPS enabled device to find a geocache near your home, city, the bush, anywhere in the world) but a Pokemon Go is a lot more fun and with cute characters to find!
The boys weren’t the only ones who love it. Australia went crazy for Pokemon GO yesterday, so much so that it overtook the election and became the hottest trending topic on social media.
What we thought:
Pokemon GO is a lot of fun and highly addictive. It also gets kids (and adults) out of the house, exercising and exploring their neighbourhood. It’s also a fun activity for the family.
The downside is you need an internet connection, so if your kids have wifi only enabled ipads, you will need to hotspot their ipads to your mobile. Other people using mobile phones have said it rapidly uses up your phone battery. If you are playing the app for a while on your phone, you will probably need a spare battery or mobile charger handy.
