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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Lifestyle -> 
Catch Pokemon if you can
    2016-07-15  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    Zhang Xiaoyi

    417880236@qq.com

    To score in “Pokemon Go,” a hit mobile game, users role-play as trainers and run around in the real world to catch Pokemon — pocket monsters that can evolve and transform with the help of Pokemon trainers.

    LEON TSANG, 24, said he wanted to play it when he heard about a beta test March 4. But it was only available for users with Japanese IP addresses at the time. Tsang, of Chinese descent, grew up in French Guiana and now worked in the game industry in Shenzhen.

    Just like him, numerous players in China are thrilled about the mobile game, though it was not put online in China’s App Store and blocked in most areas in China. Users who have downloaded the game can play it in Northeast China and Xinjiang. It is available in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Germany now.

    The game, combining GPS location and augmented reality (AR) technology, was conceived and developed by Nintendo, Pokemon Company and Niantic Labs. Niantic also released another AR game called Ingress formerly.

    To play, you fire up the game and then start trekking to prominent local landmarks — represented in the game as “Pokestops”— where you can gather supplies such as Pokeballs. Those are what you fling at online “pocket monsters,” or Pokemon, to capture them for training. At other locations called “gyms”— which may or may not be actual gyms in the real world — Pokemon battle one another for supremacy.

    “I searched on the Web for the Android Package [of the game] later in March. At first I ran the game but got stuck at a loading screen,” Tsang said. “Then I used a software to change my location to Japan.”

    “It still didn’t work. And it had a red band on the top, saying ‘don’t use mock location software,’” he said.

    Later he waited to download the game on the official launch day.

    Tsang caught his first Pokemon following the game’s tutorial that day. The next thing he knew: The game was region-locked. “I’m trying every day to see if it has been unlocked,” Tsang said, who later happily found the game worked, but only for about an hour at noon Monday. Still, he was optimistic and thought the game was just having server problem and will be available in China soon.

    Tsang said he tried Ingress before. “But I didn’t find it attractive, maybe it is because everybody was already good at playing this type of games,” he said.

    Shu, who worked in an advertising company in the city, said she can still play the game. According to Shu, she downloaded the game through an URL link instead of from the APP Store and changed some settings in her iPhone.

    Liu, a graduate student from Shenzhen University, said it was a pity that the game was locked and he looked forward to similar games developed by Tencent, the Shenzhen-based IT giant.

    Liu said he wanted to play it, because he liked watching the animation “Pokemon” released in the late 1990s in Japan. It aired on TVB, a Hong Kong television channel, around the same time, which children living in Guangdong Province had access to back then. It is still a nostalgic memory to those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And that is perhaps part of the reason why the game was so well received. Another obvious merit of the game is that it lures Internet and game-addicted millenials to actually leave their home and explore the real world. Isn’t that a fantastic and interesting way to get some exercise?

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