Nytmare
David Jose
I held off on mentioning this before, because the game had been in closed beta; but the floodgates have been opened and if you manage to hit fifth level before December 14th, you get to earn the fancy title of "Founder".
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticproject.ingress
For those who haven't heard about it before, Ingress is a (at least at the moment) Droid only, augmented reality game that's been slowly(?) sweeping the world over the past year. In my mind, the fastest and easiest way to describe it would be a combination of Geocaching and Foursquare mixed in with a multi player castle defense game and cool space ship sound effects.
A year ago, scientists discovered a new form of radiation (termed exotic matter or XM) and programmed a detector as a smart phone app. Eventually they realized that the radiation occurred naturally at places where human beings gathered to appreciate things like beautiful art, exciting architecture, or grumpy postal workers. They also realized that it was occurring naturally because there was an invisible otherworldly portal to another dimension barfing it out into our world.
Those in the know immediately split into two different factions, the Resistance (blue) who realize that the portals are the first forays into our world by an army of invading monsters, and the Enlightened (green) who I swear to God are not a bunch of crazed cultists, brainwashed into thinking that the things on the other side are our benevolent caretakers, looking to advance our society and culture and evolve the human race into something better and beautiful. Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
So you wander around the world (or at least your city), gathering energy and experience points and finding portals that you can either commandeer and collect for your side, adding to it's defenses with your team mates, and increasing its power so that you can forge better items, or enemy portals which you can blow to smithereens first. Two portals can be linked together, further adding to the power of both linked portals, and forming a barrier that other links can not cross through. Three portals can be linked to form a field, again further increasing the power of each portal, and more importantly, adding to your teams overall score
It depends a lot on where you're playing, but the early game is mostly about leveling up and trying to help stake claims. Your plays tend to be a lot smaller so that you can maximize your XP gains and in general, you're only really screwing with the other little guys, and feeding off the scraps from where the high level players have mowed down the opposition. The late game however is where it gets really exciting to me. Unshackled from having to increase your personal statistics to gain more power (no need to gain more experience points when you're max level), the game turns into a global chess match where you're clearing out enemy installations and creating havens where your lower level team mates can rush in to gather the spoils of war. Your links and fields tend to expand to cover tens if not hundreds of miles instead of few feet, and their placement becomes much more about territory and enemy control.
I love this game. Not to mention the fact that it's attached an experience point scheme to me getting off my ass and made me wander around and extra *glances at his phone* 172 kilometers in the past month that I would have otherwise spent almost entirely in front of my computer. Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nianticproject.ingress
For those who haven't heard about it before, Ingress is a (at least at the moment) Droid only, augmented reality game that's been slowly(?) sweeping the world over the past year. In my mind, the fastest and easiest way to describe it would be a combination of Geocaching and Foursquare mixed in with a multi player castle defense game and cool space ship sound effects.
A year ago, scientists discovered a new form of radiation (termed exotic matter or XM) and programmed a detector as a smart phone app. Eventually they realized that the radiation occurred naturally at places where human beings gathered to appreciate things like beautiful art, exciting architecture, or grumpy postal workers. They also realized that it was occurring naturally because there was an invisible otherworldly portal to another dimension barfing it out into our world.
Those in the know immediately split into two different factions, the Resistance (blue) who realize that the portals are the first forays into our world by an army of invading monsters, and the Enlightened (green) who I swear to God are not a bunch of crazed cultists, brainwashed into thinking that the things on the other side are our benevolent caretakers, looking to advance our society and culture and evolve the human race into something better and beautiful. Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
So you wander around the world (or at least your city), gathering energy and experience points and finding portals that you can either commandeer and collect for your side, adding to it's defenses with your team mates, and increasing its power so that you can forge better items, or enemy portals which you can blow to smithereens first. Two portals can be linked together, further adding to the power of both linked portals, and forming a barrier that other links can not cross through. Three portals can be linked to form a field, again further increasing the power of each portal, and more importantly, adding to your teams overall score
It depends a lot on where you're playing, but the early game is mostly about leveling up and trying to help stake claims. Your plays tend to be a lot smaller so that you can maximize your XP gains and in general, you're only really screwing with the other little guys, and feeding off the scraps from where the high level players have mowed down the opposition. The late game however is where it gets really exciting to me. Unshackled from having to increase your personal statistics to gain more power (no need to gain more experience points when you're max level), the game turns into a global chess match where you're clearing out enemy installations and creating havens where your lower level team mates can rush in to gather the spoils of war. Your links and fields tend to expand to cover tens if not hundreds of miles instead of few feet, and their placement becomes much more about territory and enemy control.
I love this game. Not to mention the fact that it's attached an experience point scheme to me getting off my ass and made me wander around and extra *glances at his phone* 172 kilometers in the past month that I would have otherwise spent almost entirely in front of my computer. Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
