Poke Stop

Post date: 28-Nov-2016 23:23:43

Game by: Chris Young

Reviewed by: Simon Ferré

The email I received with this game mentions Markov Chain Algorithm, and character and name generators. This had better be good. On to loading the tape, and here's a rather garish loading screen:

If this is to inspire confidence than I guess I'm at a loss at what's to come. It's not looking good. I'll have one of those candy spiral things - looks tasty.

So, what's this all about? It says this was inspired by Pokemon, but that whole genre has passed me by as I don't get a lot of data on my smart phone so I've never been out looking for one, nor do I know anyone who has. So, hopefully this will get me interested. Lets see:

Ok, seems fairly innocent. Hang on, get a saw? Chainsaw? Fretsaw? Bandsaw? Maybe this involves a lot of killing. No, I'm completely wrong. You simply have to (fairly quickly I must add) dash around the screen using the familiar QAOP keys to move onto the character square that shows signs of dodgy RAM - no, wait, that's a custom-designed UDG character of one of these, well, whatever they are called (there's actually no name given to them in the title screen) thingies. There appears to be a time limit on how quickly you must dash to the thingy.

When you do get to one in time, you then get to read all about it. There's a name and a whole slew of other information. Now, if indeed the 8-pixel high thingy is 104cm tall, you as in the UDG that is your character must be almost a dwarf. I'm not knocking dwarfs here, this is merely an observation. I have no idea what all these values represent, nor frankly do I care, as after running around the screen for a few minutes and seeing 'lots' of these things, there seeme little end to the madness.

I suggest the STOP in the title is a suggestion on what I'd like to do, but strange and daft as this game (I might have to stop calling it that) is, I kept playing for a little while longer and still there seemed to be no end to the repetition.

That reminds me of a joke: Did you hear about the computer programmer that was found dead in the shower. They say he died of exhaustion. The only thing they could find was an almost empty bottle of shampoo in his hand. Upon closer inspection, the instructions for use said: Apply. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I really do not know what to make of this game. There really doesn't seem to be a goal, unless you consider finding all of them in your lifetime a challenge. But then, how would you know if you'd seen them all or not? What about duplicates. I didn't look at the code to see if there was any point to all this futility. There are some good ideas and some good algorithms, but little else.

Score: 8x8 out of 2^64.