So Many Zubats
I’ve slowed down a bit on the Pokemon Go namely because it is getting harder and harder to find new ones. At this point I have captured 49 different critters out of the 52 I have seen, and I’ve noticed an extreme deficiency in the number of electric, fire and plant types. I’ve spent my lunches roaming around to other areas of town, attempting to sort out where they might be hiding. I would assume that plant types could maybe be found in a park, but as far as Electric and Fire types… I have no clue at all. The single Fire type that I have managed to pick up comes from a Chilli’s parking lot… which I found more than a little hillarious. As far as electric types I have been near the electrical switching station in our neighborhood with little luck, but past that there is really nowhere that streams “electrical types”. I’ve heard rumors that they often times come out during thunderstorms, but considering we have had several and I have not seen any yet I am doubting that one. The reality is there are as many rumors for how to find specific Pokemon as there were for how to summon the Ancient Cyclops in Everquest, and I figure none of them are really true. Given that this is a map based game, in theory everything should be based on some sort of obvious landmark. Following that logic I keep wondering if I can go to a graveyard to find Ghost types, but I have not been willing to cross that line yet.
The huge truism however is that we have an over abundance of Zubats. Right now they are way more common than quite literally any other type of Pokemon. There was a point where I recently had 25 that I had captured and had just been too lazy to hand them in to the trainer. I’ve made six different Golbats, and now am simply just ignoring the flappy critters when I see one. Someone has been pretty much chain summoning lures on one of the Pokestops that I walk past on the way in and out of work… and every single time I get within range it is loaded with nothing but Zubats. As I walk through the parking garage… more Zubats. All of this is hilarious when I hear from Ashgar that he has yet to even catch a single one. Then things that are super common for other people like the Oddish… are next to impossible to find around me. At some point I am thinking I need to make a trip over to Fayetteville because my friend TangerineDada has all sorts of Pokemon that I have not seen anywhere near me. Then I ask myself… is it silly to take a road trip just for capturing Pokemon? Almost certainly but it is nonetheless entertaining.
Necropolis
For a little bit now my friend have been talking about Necropolis, a new dungeon crawler from Harebrained Schemes the makers of the very awesome Shadowrun tun based RPGs. This game keeps getting compared to Dark Souls, but I am not completely sure why the reference. Essentially this is a rogue-like dungeon crawler with procedural generated levels. This is the sort of game where you are not designed to get terribly attached to your character, because more than likely you are going to die quickly and often. Similar to Rogue Legacy it has a mechanic built into the game where your deaths serve a greater purpose in that your actions garner favor with the deity of the labyrinth. You can then purchase abilities at the scriptorium which tweak your experience allowing you to have more health, or hit harder all in an attempt to fine tune your character experience. The concept of the game seems right down my alley, and the art style is reminiscent of Journey or any number of not quite realistic cartoon shaded games of late.
The game however has a bunch of problems, that I am not sure if they are intentional or if they are simply bugs that will be patched out later. Combat feels more than a little bit maddening at times in that there seems to be no limit to the number of things that can be registering attacks on you at the same time. So this means that if you are unlucky you might round the corner and get six or seven mobs swarming you at the wrong moment. Normally speaking in brawler type games this is manageable in that the game gives you invincibility frames in the form of being staggered… so that not every thing attacking you can actually register damage on you at the same time. In Necropolis you can absolutely get surrounded and watch your health go from full to zero in seconds. However for all I know there might be a scriptorium ability that changes how that works. The other slightly frustrating thing is that combat feels a little sluggish. I played with an xbox controller and right bumper is the light attack and right trigger the heavy. Even light attacks are nowhere near as responsive as I would hope them to be, and heavy attacks require near perfect timing because of the extremely lengthy swing animation. All of this said… I enjoyed the little bit that I played and I want to figure out more of the game. There are two kinds of unfair gameplay… the ones that make you just want to throw your controller across the room, and then the ones that make you want to figure out how to avoid the pitfalls of the system. This at least for me appears to be the later, so I fully expect to play a bit more tonight and get a bit further.
I named yesterday’s blog post “Walking Simulator” half jokingly, but after two days of Pokemon after dark… it is really a truthful statement. You can look at my activity tracker and see very clearly the impact of the launch of Pokemon Go. While my wife thinks I am insane, I am however outside and getting exercise without really noticing it. Last night for example I walked quite literally for an hour without really realizing it. Sure I had broken a sweat because it was 94* outside, but thankfully there was a nice wind to greet me oddly enough in pretty much any direction. The best part about this is… I am not the only one doing it. This is the second night I have gone wandering, and Wednesday night I was really hoping I would not run into server issues. However for the most part starting around 8 pm the server seemed to be more or less stable, or enough so for me to risk trying to find some of the night spawning critters. Additionally bolstering that confidence, my friend Void had posted a link to a fledgling 
At this point I have seen twenty eight different pokemon, and captured twenty six of them. I missed a Butterfree on that first lunch outing, and then failed to catch the Fearow Wednesday night due to server issues. I say not bad at all for two days worth of effort and doing all of this legitimately… aka not using the cash shop items to “attract” Pokemon. Some things I have learned through hitting Pokestops apparently forty seven times based on the stats kept within the app. Pokeballs are plentiful… I now have over 140 of them so don’t fret too much about tossing several to catch a single Pokemon. Potions and Revives are also plentiful given that I have 54 and 36 respectively. Pokestops also seem to have the rare chance of giving you some cash shop type items given that I have received at least one incense off of a stop, and one of the 3 charge extra incubators that let you keep more than one egg going at once. Things I have learned from friends is that apparently you can bolster the defenses of a gym held by your team if you place Pokemon on it as well. Right now the gym in my town is held by the team I ultimately chose, Mystic aka Team Blue. So on my way out of town this morning I plan on stopping by just long enough to slap that hefty Weepinbell I got last night on the roster. I have no clue if I will lose said Pokemon or if it will return to me if fallen, or if I can heal it with potions etc. I do however know that if you hold a gym for your team you can earn pokecoins the cash shop currency as well as other in game items.
I had errands to run so I drove out to one of the nearby hubs of shopping that houses a ton of big box stores. I needed to pick up some cat
So there I was wandering around a Target parking lot, I am sure looking like an idiot… but you know what I didn’t care. I was having fun and capturing all sorts of cool Pokemon. By the time I left that parking lot I had managed to gather up a whole bunch of new critters
Pokemon Go is a deeply connected application. Not only do you need to stay in fairly constant communication with the Niantic servers over what I am guessing is some sort of a Web Service call… you also have to have unfettered connectivity to GPS satellites in order to keep your positioning true. This means two things… namely that gameplay can be unpredictable, and that your battery will weep in misery at the drain. When I went out to lunch I had about 85% on my battery… and after about an hour of running errands and capturing Pokemon I was sitting around 52% if I remember correctly. Ingress players are notorious for carrying a bunch of portable battery packs just to make sure that their gameplay is uninterrupted and truthfully that is probably going to be the standard operating procedure with Pokemon Go as well. So in the middle of my walk last night I encountered a Fearow in the grocery store parking lot. When I went to try and capture it however I threw the ball… and the screen locked up with the ubiquitous spinning Pokeball icon in the left corner of the screen working madly on trying to reacquire a signal. I finally had to shut down the application, and reboot my phone… to restore any semblance of connectivity… and even then when I got to the PokeStop outside of my Neighborhood I couldn’t actually retrieve anything from it. While the game has launched officially now… it is very much not without issues.