I have aching legs and a dead cell phone battery. Yes, you guessed it, I have been sucked into Pokemon Go. I wasn’t really planning on playing it. Really. Sure, I heard all the hype on the internet (and even on the radio!) but I kinda went “meh, nothing will beat the original games I grew up on” and had no plans of pursuing go. Besides, it’s technically not even available in Canada yet. But then my husband became strangely obsessed with the game. He started researching about it, figured out how to “side load” it (don’t ask me, he put it on my phone for me, and he said he just googled how to do it), and now we are Pokemon Go players.

So there are three Pokestops within close walking distance around our apartment, and we have been walking laps between them. There are also two gyms within walking distance (a little further than the Pokestops, but not horifically far). We tried out battling, and clearly we need to do some leveling/practicing, but I did manage to add one of my Pokemon to a gym for about 5 minutes before the gym was defeated by another team.

I’ve collected a few facts about Pokemon Go:
1. My feet hurt. I need new shoes. Like, real shoes, with support.
2. Our local Starbucks, with a Pokestop right on top of it, is enjoying a surge in business.
3. My phone battery is going to be worn out in no time from all the draining/charging cycles its going through.
4. This game really is getting people out and about. My husband and I enjoy guessing which of the people we see out and about are playing Pokemon Go, and I suspect its quite a few of them. At the very least, it’s getting US out and about. I had no idea the number of little parks in the area.
5. The gamer rage when servers are down is unreal (and they’re down kind of a lot, when they’re not just plain glitchy)
6. Starter Pokemon are useless. No really. The only way to level them is to catch multiple of the same kind to get breed-specific candies to feed them. Since they’re super rare (as far as I can tell, although I’ve only been playing a couple days), you get your first one and then never use it because it’s super pathetically weak compared to stuff you catch even a couple levels later. This disappointed me actually quite a lot, since I went out of my way to get a Pikachu as my starter.
7. It’s fun. No really. Get it on your phone and get out in the world.

Oh, and there are some dangers involved. VG Cats explains one humorously.