Ingress

The world around you is not what it seems.

Posted December 12, 2012
Written By Ken Stark
2 Comments
6432 Views

So you may have heard of this game. It’s called Ingress and, well I think I’m gonna struggle with trying to explain it. Bear with me. I’m not going to explain every aspect of it, for that you should just pick up the game really, there’s a tutorial that walks you through how to play. I’ll just run though the basics and tell you what we think about it.

So Ingress is a game that’s really designed to get your ass out of the house. It’s an augmented reality type game, meaning the real world is the game board so to speak. What you’ll be doing is walking around town, “hacking” certain locations which contain portals. Portals are usually located around historical monuments, buildings, sculptures, stuff like that.

When you first start playing you will have to pick a side, you can choose from the Enlightenment, or the Resistance. Portals can be linked to create fields, and this is how you can tell which side is winning the game. The fields that are created cover a certain area, with a certain amount of people in that area. All those people are your score.

And now, my actual thoughts on Ingress

So I’ve been playing this for about a week now, and I’m kinda getting addicted to it. Lynn and I went out Saturday and walked around downtown Indianapolis for about 3 hours just hacking portals, visiting all the different monuments and stuff that are featured in the game. It was really nice to get out of the house for a while and do that.

As you can see, there’s really nothing nearby us in Ingress.

The game is really best if you live in the city. Out in the suburbs where we are, there aren’t any portals around for a few miles really, the ones that are nearby are all libraries and post offices. When you get into the city that’s where you’ve got all the historical buildings and monuments and art stuff that gets submitted as portals. That’s where it’s pretty fun cause you can spend the day walking around, attacking portals and screwing around.

And hey, as an added bonus, it’s exercise! Who says us geeks have to sit at home and play video games on our asses?! Here’s a game that has us walking around outside, and getting some fresh air! It’s kinda scary being outside, there’s this bright orange ball up in the sky, it’s weird. And I think that ball is trying to kill me. But you get used to it.

All in all, it’s pretty fun, and we’re starting to make this a weekly thing, get out of the house, walk around downtown and play with our portals.