Hands On With Pokémon GO: Pokémon GO Hunters! (jhlongman)

I’ve been meaning to do another one of these, but with everything going on, I’ve not really had the time until now, so here’s my next instalment for “Hands on with Pokémon GO!”

Since my last/first piece for this series I’ve only had three chances to go out and experience the delights of Pokémon GO, especially since for the likes of me, just one hour of playing it eats up quite a chunk of credit, when I use the data on my Pay As You Go SIM card, so last weekend I tried something else. The something else was wifi, as I visited a locale that has a number of wifi spots dotted around a number of PokéStops, but honestly wifi is just the worst way to play. Every time a Pokémon that I really needed/just wanted popped up, I’d go to take two steps towards it and it would be gone, due to me losing connection because I am no longer in range of the wifi spot I was just using.

To say it only happened once would be a lie, it happened a lot and when there were Pokémon beside me I could catch, they were mostly Nidorans (both male and female) and Caterpies and given the number I had already, I couldn’t be that bothered with catching them. Still I wasn’t in any rush to leave just yet, so I thought I would try hatching eggs instead, what with being .3k shy of three eggs hatching, but have you tried walking round in circles with wifi as your only internet connection? People soon catch on to what you’re doing and with internet being so bad in my neck of the woods, occasionally although I would be within in range, the wifi would go in an instant and I’d have to spend up to 20 minutes trying to reconnect.

Hatching those three eggs took far longer than it needed to and to be honest with you, they only gave me more of the same so that day was something of a bust in the end, so I went out the next day, topped off my phone and used it all up catching whatever came my way and a lot did come my way and I caught them all! I caught so many that I could actually evolve around 40 Pokémon, but I didn’t because in a few days time, Mike Scorpio would be in town and the two of us were going to set out hunting Pokémon!

That fateful day was the 27^th of July and the two of us were ready to go. The car was fuelled up, the laptop was on and I had a whole load of balls waiting to be thrown! Using the data on Mike’s phone as he allowed me to tether to it, my connection was perfect and I was able to catch a few more Pokémon that I didn’t have before, such as a decent Machoke and a very hard to catch Butterfree that ate up a lot of my balls, what with me having to attempt to catch it twice within 10 minutes. (The app glitched and it got away the first time, but when I rebooted Pokémon GO, the Butterfree was back and I wasn’t going to let it get away from me again.)

We, the Pokémon GO Hunters certainly didn’t catch them all that day, as problems continued to rain down on us as the server crashed, PokéVision refused to work and Mike’s GPS refused to work most of the time, but I didn’t walk away empty handed, not when we found a nice quiet place to sit down and do some evolving. Through the process I managed to jump from being Level 17 to a few thousand points shy of Level 20 and managed to add at least 15 Pokémon to my Pokédex, so I am rather pleased with that, plus with us having “failed” in what we set out to do, it just means we’ll be back to do it all again and be on Hands on with Pokémon GO once more. So as long as there are still Pokémon waiting for us to catch, Mike and I have plenty of more playing to do!