 You know how there’s a warning on Pokemon Go not to play the game while driving? This guy never got the memo, and when he is eventually sent it, needs it sent another seven times, just to be sure.
As The Seattle Times reports, Washington State troopers noticed a car stopped on the shoulder of a busy highway on Tuesday night, and pulled over to see if the driver needed assistance. Instead, they found him sitting in the driver’s seat holding a foam block, inside which was resting space for eight phones, each of them logged into Pokemon Go. He wasn’t given a ticket, since the cops technically never saw him driving while playing (even though he had to have been to have known when to pull over), but he was given a warning (for pulling onto a shoulder when it wasn’t an emergency) and told to put the phones in the back seat so that they weren’t distracting him.
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 Trainers, it seems that a new version of Adventure Sync (V2) is being tested in Australia and New Zealand. A new Adventure Sync popup and a new “Adventure Sync: Nearby” setting toggle have been observed by players in both regions.
According to the data mining efforts and research done in the past, the new Adventure Sync functionality should notify you if new Pokemon are appearing nearby. Early reports indicate that this only refers to Pokemon that you haven’t caught before – the ones that appear as “shadows” in your Nearby screen. Unfortunately, players haven’t reported actually receiving any notifications since they’ve enabled this setting, so it’s likely a staged roll out. We’ll keep you updated on the state of this feature, especially with Generation V release coming closer and closer. If this popup (and setting) appears for you, please let us know, especially if you’re in Europe or Americas. Currently, 0.151.0 is the minimum required version to play the game, hence all of the reports have been from this version.  Following on the yesterday’s new experimental daily news format, we’re continuing the tradition. Let’s see what’s new in Pokemon GO today:
Reminder: the Gifts event 🎁🎁🎁 is still active and lasts until August 19, 2019 1 PM PDT. The number of gifts you can open daily is temporarily increased to 30 and you can have 20 gifts in your inventory! Couple of Gaming’s excellent stardust gain chart for the event, titled “How to become a Stardust Millionaire” is a must have for Blanche’s Stardust week. Download it, use it, share it. Give them some love on Instagram and Twitter.   Niantic hosted the final Pokemon Go Fest of the summer in Yokohama, Japan last week, and as it had done for the previous two Go Fests, the studio held a series of global challenges during the event. As a reward for completing these challenges, the developer is making a handful of bonuses available in the game this week, and it's bringing another Legendary dog back for a special Raid Day on Saturday.
From August 13-20, you'll be able to earn triple the normal amount of Stardust for each Pokemon you capture or hatch. On top of that, you'll earn 3,000 Stardust for participating in Raid Battles, and any Star Pieces you use during the week will last for one hour rather than 30 minutes. As a final reward, Suicune is making another appearance in five-star Raids on Saturday, August 17. The Legendary Water Pokemon will be available from 4-7 PM local time that day only. Not only does this give you another opportunity to add one to your collection if you've previously missed it in the game, you'll also have a chance of encountering its Shiny form during the Raid hours. Suicune isn't the only Legendary making an encore appearance in Pokemon Go; Rayquaza also recently returned to Raid Battles for a limited time. The Legendary monster will be appearing in five-star Raids until September 2, and you'll have your first chance to catching a Shiny Rayquaza until then. You can read more tips on how to catch the Legendary in our Pokemon Go Rayquaza guide. Meanwhile, Pokemon Go's next Community Day is set for September 15. The featured Pokemon this time around will be Turtwig, the Grass-type starter from Diamond and Pearl. Throughout the event, Turtwig will spawn in the wild much more often than it normally does, and you'll have your first chance to find a Shiny Turtwig. Additionally, you'll earn triple the normal amount of Stardust for each Pokemon you catch during the event.  Pokémon Go’s next Community Day in September will be focused on the Sinnoh region grass-type starter, Turtwig.
The Community Day will take place on Sept. 15 from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. in your local time. Note that this is quite a bit earlier than the previous Community Days. The event will feature an increased spawn rate to Turtwigs and an increased chance to grab Shiny versions of the lovely plant-turtle-thing. During the three-hour period, lures will last for three hours instead of 30 minutes and players will get tripled Stardust from catching Pokémon. The special move Torterra will learn when evolved is still a mystery on the Pokémon Go website, but based on past patterns, it’s likely going to be the powerful grass-type move that goes to all the grass starters: Frenzy Plant. Torterra likely won’t become the best grass-type attacker from this alone, but it will end up being pretty dang strong.  MELBOURNE: Over the first weeks of July 2016, a strange phenomenon started to unfold in many parts of the world. A mobile game went viral.
Streets in Barcelona, Melbourne, Singapore and New York began to fill with hordes digital wayfaring as part of the augmented reality (AR) game, Pokemon Go. The game popularised the digital overlay technique of AR, in which real-time wayfaring could be converged with digital play. In its heyday, Pokemon Go searches surpassed porn on the internet. Then, it became mundane media – and this is when it became really interesting. HOW ONE ELDERLY WOMAN FOUND POKEMON GO Meet the 67-year-old nurse Sofia, who lives in Badalona in Spain. After losing her husband to cancer a decade ago, Sofia initially found it hard to fight the grief and depression. Her daughters and grandchildren helped her in this transition. Sofia is especially close to her seven-year-old grandson, Diego. They do many activities together, constantly sharing intergenerational skills. It was Diego who first introduced Sofia to Pokemon Go. As they wandered the streets of Badalona together, Diego would show her the digital overlays of Pokemon Go that reinvented Sofia’s everyday experiences of mundane spaces. Diego taught Sofia how to flick the touch screen to capture Pokemon. And he taught Sofia digital wayfaring – that is, how the digital is entangled with the body’s movement. Pokemon Go allowed Sofia to learn some of the multiple ways her familiar city could be reinvented. Eventually, Sofia opened her own Pokemon Go account. She would sometimes find herself briskly walking the streets in search of Pokemon. Mundane trips to the market or shops became Pokemon Go adventures in which she would reinvent the routes to capture more Pokemon. The city became a complex overlay of digital, material, environmental and social cartographies. The game also made Sofia feel fit and socially engaged in her community. And she became an outstandingly super-cool grandmother in the eyes of her grandson, Diego. The “old media” of Pokemon Go enriched Sofia’s life: It reinvented the city she has lived in for all her life; it allowed her playful ways to further develop her relationship with her grandson; and it afforded her new ways to connect with other generations. But Sofia’s story is not an exception. In fact, her story is one example of an increasingly common way “old” mundane technologies are being playfully deployed for digital health solutions, one that brings older generations closer to their urban communities. GAME ENCOURAGE EXERCISE AND SOCIAL INCLUSION Badalona is renowned for its innovative and integrated healthcare system, centralised through the city council. There, social workers are recommending Pokemon Go to clients to boost two key dimensions of ageing well: Exercise and social inclusion. Part of the gameplay involves cooperation, for example, to win in a raid, players need to organise to meet up and battle together. Our yet-to-be-published research uses data from a meet-up bot we built on the messenger program Telegram, to help people organise Pokemon Go raid boss battles. Over 6,000 battles were fought throughout 2018, with almost 29,000 individuals meeting and establishing social connections and relationships in Badalona. What’s more, there is much to learn from the lived experiences of Sofia that requires us to change how we think about play and digital health. For instance, the haptic sensibility of the game (the perception of objects through the sense of touch) privileges motion awareness, so it’s more attuned to Sofia’s fading eyesight. Badalona is a great example of how intergenerational play can redefine a city by allowing users to navigate through multiple senses – touch, sound and sight – that digital play stimulates. When we spoke to Sofia for our research, we were able to reflect on how games like Pokemon Go highlight the paradoxes of a city that’s datafied to an app. While Pokemon Go encouraged physical exercise and social inclusion as part of its strategic gameplay, it also exposed how inherent social, cultural and economic biases in cities become embedded in everyday movement. For example, Pokemon Go’s game engine drew on algorithms of Badalona which had inherent biases in the form of redlining. In other words, peripheral neighbourhoods had fewer Poke stops. This includes areas or zones of the city with a high concentration of socially excluded people, and the places that are physically further away from the centre of the city. PRIORITISE THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE There are many things we can learn from Badalona’s strategies for ageing well, which centres on lived experience. Rather than inventing new apps for the cartographies of the city, they playfully reinvent the mundane. We should look towards civic urban play for innovation. Play is an interdisciplinary concept linking culturally specific ideas of creativity with expression. And it allows for different forms of social innovation across digital, material and social worlds. Play can also teach us how to think about the intersection of technology and health in different ways that prioritise human experience. And in terms of ageing societies, play might hold the key to developing human-centred approaches for the future.  The latest Pokemon Go event is all about Gifts. On the heels of the Pokemon Go Rayquaza raid, today the mobile catch-'em-up launched a Gift campaign which raises the amount of Gifts players can hold and open. The event goes live today and will run through Monday, August 19.
For the next two weeks, Pokemon Go players will be able to open 30 Gifts each day and hold up to 20 at once. Any Eggs you receive from Gifts will also hatch after just 2km, no matter what tier of Egg they are. As Niantic explained in a blog post, "all Eggs received from Gifts during the event will require only 2 km to hatch and look like 2 km Eggs, but don’t worry, Trainers! The Pokémon that hatch from them will be ones that normally appear in 7 km Eggs, regardless of whether you incubate or hatch them during or after the event." Just as importantly, Eggs opened during this Gift event may yield Shiny Bonsly - who, I want to point out, looks just like the Easter-y Gifts. That's Shiny synergy I can get behind. After Shiny Ralts in the Pokemon Go Community Day and Shiny Rayquaza in the August raids, Bonsly is the third exclusive Shiny of the month, and we're only five days in. August is looking like a good time for collectors.  Pokemon Go is adding two new families of Shiny Pokemon for a pair of upcoming events starting next week. The popular mobile game will add the Shiny variants of Bonsly, Sudowoodo, Poliwag, Poliwhirl, Poliwrath, and Politoed as part as events coming to the game beginning tomorrow. The Shiny variant of Bonsly will be added to Pokemon Go beginning on August 5th as part of a special Gift-themed event. During the event, players can collect up to 20 gifts to send to friends and send up to 30 gifts per day. Any egg collected from a Gift during an event will contain a 2 KM egg instead of a 7 KM egg, but will feature the same Pokemon found in a 7 KM egg. Basically, players have a better chance of collecting Baby Pokemon like Bonsly during the event, which runs from August 5th through August 19th.
Meanwhile, the Shiny variant of Poliwag will be added to Pokemon Go to celebrate the next Pokemon Go Fest, which takes place on August 6th in Japan. Poliwag will spawn much more frequently around the globe during the 4-day Pokemon Go Fest, and players will be tasked with completing 16 million Field Research tasks. If completed, players will get special Stardust Bonuses and a Special Suicune Raid Day on August 9th. In addition to the various Shiny events, players can also capture a Shiny Rayquaza by battling the Pokemon in raids through the month of August. Players can also battle Team Rocket Grunts in Pokemon Go at corrupted various PokeStops. Needless to say, Pokemon Go is having a very busy August, with plenty of events and bonuses for players to enjoy.  With the arrival of Team Rocket in Pokemon Go, the huge mobile game is changing once again – and one new element that’s arrived alongside the villainous team are Shadow Pokemon and, after some trainer effort, Purified Pokemon.
Shadow Pokemon are a special new addition to Pokemon Go, though they have appeared in other Pokemon games before. They appear as part of the Team Rocket Pokestop invasions where Rocket Grunts turn Pokestops into Rocket Stops. In order to encounter Shadow Pokemon you’ll first need to find a Team Rocket Grunt – more information on that in the link above. How to catch Shadow Pokemon in Pokemon Go After finding yourself an invaded Rocket Pokestop, you’ll be able to battle the nearby Team Rocket Grunt NPC. These grunts will deploy red-eyed Shadow Pokemon against you in battle. After a battle is complete, you’ll get a chance to catch one of the Rocket Grunt’s Shadow Pokemon – exactly which is plucked from the table of available Shadow Pokemon in the game, which you can find a little below. The number of Premier Balls you have to catch the Shadow Pokemon will be determined by your battle performance – like with Pokemon Gym Raid Bosses, but in a single-player, player-versus-enemy setting. The Premier Ball allowance is determined by how many Pokemon are still conscious on your team at the end of battle and by some of your medal levels. Pokemon Go Shadow Battle Counters & Weaknesses When the time comes to fight Shadow Pokemon and Rocket Grunts, there’s a few Shadow Pokemon you can encounter that form high-end, raid-like boss encounters – Snorlax, Dragonite, Blastoise, Charizard and Venusaur. As with Pokemon Go Raid bosses, the best thing to be aware of are the counters and weaknesses for fighting these Shadow Pokemon so you can exploit their type strengths and weaknesses with your best Pokemon and defeat them quickly and efficiently. With that in mind, here are some notes for each… Shadow Snorlax Counters & Weakness Snorlax is a normal-type Pokemon, which tends to be quite easy to defeat in general – but the Shadow version of this guy is no joke. It can take some serious punishment, soaking up the damage like it’s nothing. We suggest the following counters:
Shadow Dragonite Counters & Weakness Dragonite presents you with the classic dragon-type Pokemon weakness conundrum – it’s dragon is weak to dragon, so the best way to down it is to bring along another dragon-type… but then that will also be twice as vulnerable to Dragonite’s attacks. It’s also weak to Ice, however. Here’s some strong counters to Shadow Dragonite of both the dragon-type and otherwise…
Shadow Vensaur Counters & Weakness Venusaur is primarily grass-type (with a side of poison), and so taking down its shadow version is best done with a healthy dose of fire. Here’s some counter suggestions:
Shadow Charizard Counters & Weakness As a joint Fire and flying-type Pokemon, Charizard has some solid weaknesses that can be exploited as counters for this battle – so despite its power, it’s one of the easier high-end Shadow Pokemon to take down right now. It’s all about the water and rock types…
Shadow Blastoise counters & Weakness Countering water-type shadow Pokemon is all about bringing out the powerful grass-type beasts. Thunder can work great too, but for our money grass is where it’s at, especially considering a water-type shadow encounter has a chance to be Marshtomp, which will resist Thunder. Here’s some of our Shadow Blastoise counter suggestions…
Purifying Shadow Pokemon to make powerful Purified Pokemon with the exclusive Return move Once you’ve caught a Shadow Pokemon, it’ll be added to your Pokemon roster like any other catch, but it will retain its shadowy nature, keeping the red eyes and the nasty purple cloud around it. Shadow Pokemon will also have the charged normal-type move Frustration, which is a fine move and all but also not as useful as any of the more specific moves it could have. Other than that, Shadow Pokemon act and function like any other. The good news is that you can cure that shadowy evil presence with a few simple steps – and this is known and Purifying Pokemon. You can do this from a Pokemon’s profile page, and purifying a Pokemon will cost a small amount of candy and stardust.  On July 22nd, 2019, Niantic officially released the Team GO Rocket Invasion event. Several trainers are reporting Shadow Pokemon being available to battle across the world, featuring Team GO Rocket Grunts!
Stay tuned to this post for further details. The event is currently being rolled out in stages to Pokemon GO accounts. If you can't use this feature yet, check back in a little while. PokeStops that have the Team Rocket interaction will look slightly "glitched out" at a distance, changing color from black to blue and twitching periodically. Affected stops should fade from blue to black as you approach them. PokeStops that have been taken over by Team Rocket have an "R" above them and are "greyed out". Stops appear to be taken over by grunts for 30 minutes, though there are some conflicting reports saying this timer can decrease after being defeated by another trainer. Players who interact with these PokeStops will have the chance to fight, and then catch, a "Shadow Pokemon". Battles are done in Master League, though the teams you'll face should be pretty easy, despite the deceptively high CP. Upon completion, you'll receive a number of Premiere Balls relative to your performance.
Shadow Pokemon have red eyes and a ghostly purple shadow animation. They will know the charged move Frustration by default. They can be transfered, traded, and placed in gyms like normal. Shadow Pokemon also can be purified for a small candy and stardust cost.
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