Pokémon Go!... What I think of it.

And so the world is now into a new craze - Pokémon Go!.

Like everyone else who was not really into the game in my school days, I just decided to jump into the bandwagon anyways to give it a go and here are the few opinions of my own that I would like to share after tryin to catch em' all for over a week.

Firstly, safety. As a parent, I am always on the lookout for my boy's safety.

Numerous cases have that happened around the world about people getting into accidents due to negligence and being too preoccupied in the game. People walking across the road without looking out for traffic, drivers focusing on trying to catch a Pikachu instead of keeping eyes on the road, people banging into one another and the list goes on. We are talking about adults getting into shit and stuff. What more if the game is in the hands of a child. To a parent like me, definately a no-go when it comes to exposing my little one to this game.

Secondly, the App just sucks. Really. The GPS lags most of the time and navigating around the game is just tedious. The time taken from tapping on a pokemon appearing, to you tapping it, to the screen where you try to capture it, to after you have captured it, to the point where it has to announce the capture and thennnnn showing the Pokemon's data... all of this with lag time in between. It is really a big turn off.

Secondly, the chore of transferring those ever so common little monsters just to get 1 candy each time and having to collect loads of those damn candies just to evolve one. I'm sure many of you share this feeling. It is tiring. By the time you are done, you have already lost a chunk of your phone battery's life. Which brings me to my third point about the game: battery life.

Be prepared to carry around some spare batteries or power banks cause this game sucks the life out of your phone since it is running your GPS, your data, your screen time and gameplay, constantly. Although there is a battery saver mode in the game itself, it doesn't help much. And since there's so many things going on at the same time, your precious phone will get real hot in just 10 minutes of active game time - and turning on incense would mean 3 times more of active game time if you do not want to waste your precious incense. And we all know that high heat and electronics don't go well together and I love my phone.

Lastly, the game sure does have it's benefits like making people come together - at Pokéstops - and making people move around and hopefully be more active and then I just found out there's GPS Joystick. (Google it.) After putting some effort in hunting down those monsters, I now know that a man can just sit down and let his finger do the walking and he can be a Pokémon Master within a week or so. All that effort now down the drain.

For someone like me who enjoy playing games on my phone at times, this game is nothing more than a hype which will eventually die down... especially knowing there is a cheat code readily available with minimal effort required to be a Pokémon Master.