Thought about putting this in the Android App thread, but I realized that the discussion around it might mean it would seriously derail things there, plus with an iOS version on the horizon, it make more sense as its own.
Ingress is a geo-location game that a Google division Niantic Labs has developed.
Somewhat in a similar vein to Own This World, it deals with controlling certain in game portals linked to real world places, often works of art or landmarks. It had been in beta for over a year, and was recently released this past December.
From
Wiki
Quote:
|
The game makers' framing device for the game is as follows: Earth has been seeded with “Exotic Matter,” or XM, associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race which is neither described nor seen (and which thus functions as a MacGuffin). The in-universe motivation for the Enlightened faction is their belief that the Shapers are working toward a powerful enlightenment which will uplift all mankind. The Resistance believes that it is protecting humanity from Shaper ingression.
|
How it works is you need to locate a portal on your scanner (phone) and walk/drive within range of the portal. At that point you can hack the portal to gain items, attack it if it belongs to your enemy, claim it for yourself, or reinforce it if it belongs to your faction. If you own a portal, you can link it to another portal of the same faction and if you enclose an area on 3 sides, you create a field for your faction, somewhat indicating an area of control.
Occasionally, you get people who build massive fields that span between countries, or to create works of art.
See more examples
Right now it is only available on Android, but it is due out on iOS sometime in 2014.
You can play it driving from portal to portal, or even snag the occasional hack while you are riding passenger in a car/bus but the game really encourages getting out and walking to capture the portals. I have easily doubled the walking I do every day, getting out of the office at lunch hour to retake something that an enemy took in the morning.
There is a web portal, at
http://www.ingress.com/intel so you can see what is up out of range of your scanner. For example, this is what downtown Calgary looks like right now:
(Spoiled since it is a bit wide)
There is a pretty good social part of the game as well, for example, at lunch today some people met at CMP to clean out an enemy stronghold. As people gain levels, which max at 8 ( I am at 7 after less than 5 weeks), they tend to pass of their older weapons to other players, to stay underneath the item cap of 2000 items.
I am Rathji, and I am Enlightened.
Get the game, or more info:
http://www.ingress.com/
The Niantic Wiki, really good for the back story and older media releases.
http://niantic.schlarp.com/start
Not suprisingly, they have a strong presense on Google +
https://plus.google.com/+Ingress/posts