Ingress WebsiteAnyone else get into the Beta?
FYI, ingress is a game that uses the android phones/tablets/gps equipped devices for a social metagame.
I got in yesterday.
Initial thoughts:
BATTERY whore, bigtime.
Nice clean gfx, regardless of device.
Needs more user submitted portals for Brisbane. Going to take a bunch of geolocated pics of landmarks etc in QLD and submit like a mad bastard. More portals = more playing. No portals = nothing to do but build up your xm reserves.
Ok, the gist of the "game":
pick a side. the game consists of a google maps stripped down street view with nothing else on it, except for virtual motes of exotic matter (xm) which you "collect" by being within 50m to build up your reserves.
You wander around the city (literally) looking for portals. Portals are user submitted, and are usually murals, statues, buildings with interesting art and or high population.
Once you find a portal, you hack it for items. You can place resonators to level the portal up. Higher levels of resonators require more people to do. eg: level 8 portals require 8 people to place a single level 8 resonator.
You need to link 3 portals together to form a field between all 3.
This field is either a "forcefield" or a "mindcontrol field" depending on your side.
The higher the level of portal, the further away it can link to other portals, up to 100s of kms.
The "winning" side is the one with the most fields of influence.
There is a all or faction chat, allowing you to organise hacks on specific portals in a pseudo anonymous manner. (as you need to be within 50m of a portal to hack it)
All in all its an interesting social experiment, with google photos being collected I suppose. It does encourage you to wander around your city, either finding new portals to submit, with a nice photo, or visiting known portals.
I'm ferrisxb9r, and I'm Enlightened.
BTW, sign up with as many emails as you have, as the auth code you receive isn't tied to any specific email, you just need to input it when you link an email and create a username. Also, you can't get the program from google play in australia, but you can download the APK by googling "ingress apk" and downloading from the mgamers website. 21meg download.
Downloads