Monday, July 25, 2016

I JUST JOINED THE POKE PACK

I was just outside and saw about a dozen people wandering around my neighborhood with their phones in their hands. I say wandering, not walking and I now know why thanks to my wife. Apparently, everyone is playing the new Pokemon Go game and it doesn’t discriminate between young or old.

There I was at 7 p.m. I just got home from work and was going to retrieve my mail from my mailbox when I saw some kids lingering at the side of my yard along the tree-line. I was about to yell, “Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!” when I turned and saw several others in the same vicinity. Then, I look down the street and see two more kids and their mom mulling around my neighbor’s front yard. All of them had their smartphones in their hands. That’s when my wife came to the door and told me what was going on.

She told me that the Pokemon Go app just launched this month, along with a cell phone spy elite software, and it’s become a summer phenomenon. It’s some kind of scavenger hunt where you have to find some crazy critters that appear on your phone over the camera view so that when you look at your iPhone, one of those things looks like its standing in your yard—like some monstrous leprechaun. Apparently, everyone is loving it.

The game is based on the Pokemon game and characters that were popular back in the 1990s. Whoever revived it this way is some kind of genius if you ask me. I went to Wikipedia to look it up and it said, “’Pokémon Go’ (stylized as Pokémon GO) is a free-to-play location-based augmented reality mobile game developed by Niantic and published by The Pokémon Company as part of the Pokémon franchise. It was released in July 2016 for iOS and Android devices…. The game allows players to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, who appear throughout the real world. It makes use of GPS and the camera of compatible devices.”

Apparently, players start by making their own avatars—which they can customize—and then go out in the real world, phones in hand, to hunt down other ’Pokémon creations. Now, I’m no Spring chicken, but even I think that’s pretty cool. So I went and downloaded the app on my phone—yes I have an iPhone—and started hunting as well. I can’t tell you how much fun I’m having—not to mention, I’m starting to meet a bunch of the neighbors that I never really knew too well. Now I’m part of a Poke-pack made up of little kids, moms and dads, teens and older folk like myself. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun in years! You gotta love this modern world. Just when you think you’ve seen everything, then there’s this.


However, I’ve heard about kids being robbed by thieves waiting at popular Poke sites, which got me thinking about how important it is for parents to either accompany them everywhere or install one of those cell phone spy equipment apps or cell phone spy dialer software I always hear about so that they can check up on them.


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