Pokemon GO

• Pokemon Go is a free game. it's popular these days you can get it on Android or ios.

At least in the short term, Pokemon Go is a proven phenomenon with millions of players. I was at a party in the San Francisco Bay Area over the weekend where at least two dozen adults were out on the front lawn, calling out the names of Pokemon as they appeared on our phones. We ran inside when someone claimed a Bulbasaur was in the fridge; we ran back outside for Ponyta. We walked a block or two to challenge a nearby Gym only to have it taken over right from under us by someone we didn't know and couldn't see, and we all had the app crash on us a few too many times during our hour out and about. It was silly and frustrating and fun all at once.

If you can say nothing else about Pokémon Go, at the very least you must admit that it's a phenomenon to a degree that's rarely seen in gaming.

In a matter of a week, this new mobile take on Nintendo's long-running role-playing game series has grown astoundingly popular. It has consumed social media conversation, flooded into mainstream news reports and had an impact on the everyday life of many players, in a physical, outside-the-game way.

Catching a Pokémon, unlike in the handheld games, involves swiping at the monster once you find it on the map. This is deceptively simple. A good aim and perfect timing is required to ensure your catch, but the game never showed me how to do this, or even bothered to explain that the circles that appear around a Pokémon during a random encounter are important.

Pokémon Go is the first smartphone release from The Pokémon Company, which has been looking after this multimillion-selling video game franchise since 1998. Created by augmented reality specialist Niantic Inc, the developer behind Google’s experimental AR game Ingress, it’s a massive-multiplayer, location-based spin-off from the role-playing fantasy series.

Using a player’s smartphone camera and GPS signal, the game makes it seem as if wild Pokémon are cropping up on the streets of the real world. When walking around and exploring, players – or trainers as they are called in the game – are greeted with rustling bits of grass, which signal a Pokémon’s presence. Walking closer will trigger them to appear, and tapping on them will initiate a Pokébattle. With the optional augmented-reality turned on, it may look as if a Caterpie is peeking out from the grass just outside the front door, putting players right in the shoes of a Pokémon trainer.

Where the much-loved Pokémon games of the 1990s and 2000s had players assuming the role of kids coming-of-age in a monster-inhabited alternative Japan, Pokémon Go encourages those now-grown Pokémon-crazed millennials to get outside and turn whole neighbourhoods into shared Pokémon safari parks. When Go was announced last September, it was already being heralded as a landmark experiment in augmented and virtual-reality gaming. This, coupled with the never-to-be-underestimated power of nostalgia for 90s-era-brands, has served to generate enormous Poké-hype.

Even before you really get into the experience, however, there are a handful of technical problems, which now seems standard for a connected game in the early stages of its release. Pokémon Go crashes with a frustrating frequency (sometimes depriving a player of hard-won Pokémon, should a crash be so misfortunately timed), it is slow to respond in areas with poor cell signal, and the strain on the phone’s battery makes a portable charger an essential piece of every trainer’s kit. Even beyond these minor technical difficulties, there are problems: an opaque user interface, poorly explained mechanics, and tiresome battle sequences with no discernable connection to the Pokémon games millions of fans have come to know and love.