Ingress - The fate of humanity!

" INGRESS! The fate of the world lies in the palm of your hand. Tip the balance with the tips of your fingers. Walk to embrace change for humanity, or walk to defend humanity from invasion! Pick your faction, dive into the action! "

If you're into Augmented Reality (AR), this is THE app for you. Developed by Google's very own NianticLabs, it is essentially a game. In a nutshell, you play as part of two factions, one embraces the change for humanity called the Enlightened, and the other opposes and considers it as an invasion, called Resistance. I myself have only played it recently, but find it deeply absorbing. You literally have to walk around to collect Exotic Matters or XM used to capture "portals" scattered across the world. 

Ingress is categorized as an AR-based MMORPG. Since it is developed by Google for Android platform, you will need an Android device to play it. Now you may be intimidated by the fact that it is an AR game and you may need high end devices to play, but don't worry - a lot of  devices can support this game. There is no heavy graphical processing going on at the background. You do need at least Gingerbread (Android version 2.3) and above to play it, and good internet connection with WiFi and GPS support is recommended.  

As I've mentioned earlier, the main objective in Ingress is to capture as many portals as you can, and link them together to form a field that may span across a small area, or as large as inter-cities. I could imagine it spanning across states and countries even. Since it is an MMORPG, you will be playing as part of either one of two factions - namely Enlightened and Resistance. (To be totally fair, I will not be mentioning which faction I'm playing for, although it is tempting to recruit my readers as part of my faction)

Portals are usually unique landmarks, buildings with historical or architectural value or importance, should be highly accessible and is a permanent fixture of the area. Some of them include arches, water features, public transit stations, entrances signs etc. Some of the portals in Kuching are shown in pics. There are more in the Peninsular, especially KL and Johor, as well as the neighbouring Singapore. 

When you're near a portal, you can hack it to get items. If a portal is neutral (Grey color in the game), you can deploy Resonators to capture it for your Faction (Blue represents the Resistance, Green represents the Enlightened). You can link portals together with a portal key obtained randomly as you hack portals, and attack enemy portals to force it back to a neutral state and then recapture it.

The most interesting aspect of the game is that you will be walking around from one portal to another. You may want to drive too if it's too far, or take the public transport. Point is, you'll be moving around. Me and my friend tried it yesterday afternoon, and it took us from Tugu Pahlawan, the temple at the end of Carpenter Street and around Waterfront area. I have to admit at that time I was a little lost because I couldn't make sense of anything in the game, but now that I've read a little about it, I think I'm good to go.

The game itself is still in beta version, downloadable from Google Play for free. However, you have to request an invite and get the activation code to play. It's still free, but I got mine about two weeks after requesting for an invite to play. Let not that put you off from trying it though, because I tell you it is very addictive - more than Candy Crush Saga or Subway Surfers and the likes. 

PS : Future posts will include details about the game and some of its mechanics, guides, media and in-game items, hints and tips.