Parallel Kingdom - What Cantr wants to be, on your phone

[Agar]

Available for download on your iDevice or Android phone, Parallel Kingdom is a Free MMO where you build cities cooperating with other players, start wars, attack other players territories, all from your phone using google maps as your playground. The first GPS location based MMO available, it offers innovative design and social networking with cooperative or competitive play and a wide variety of things to hunt, build, craft, trade, sell in game, all for free.

If cantr is down, look Parallel Kindom up.

[Rob Maule]

It does look pretty cool, but I was disappointed it's not on the Blackberry. I think it would work well on the Storm. But maybe it's more dependent on Google Maps than a particular OS. And their focus seems to be on Android. Time for a new phone, maybe?

I think this game kinda reminds me of foursquare, except you're limited to certain cities and it's less of an RPG and more try to take over the world. There's also SFZero which focuses more on completing missions.

There's a lot of cool stuff coming out relating to "augmented realities" for mobile phones. For example, Google Goggles lets you point your phone at a thing or a store and get more info on it. I saw an article online yesterday that talked about it: Network World.

I think the world is getting closer and closer to Rainbows End. And I like it.

[Rob Maule]

Sorry if I'm derailing the thread, but I found some other "augmented reality" games similar to Parallel Kingdom and others. There's a great collection of demos that can be found here. They also link to the top AR games of all time, in the update at the top.

And for anyone interested, Google Books is hosting the entire Rainbows End book here. It won the 2007 Hugo Award and perfectly showcases augmented reality, which I think is a great direction in gaming.

[chase02]

Very interesting.

[Agar]

http://layar.com/

Not so much a game as that augmented reality you mentioned. Layar is a great free app on your android phone, just as simple as typing in your search, of even picking a search pre-set, like "eats", and holding your camera up. Results are overlaid on the camera view, you can see what is where, and get information and directions right at your fingertips.

Blackberries are good business phones, but not gaming platforms, so if your run a business or just work from your phone, keep in mind : A - make sure you can receive 'push' emails if your looking to switch to a different phone, especially if you get emails around a firewall, as not every device can do this. and B - your buyers remorse policy, in case you just don't like the device, and make sure you know that you need to keep the box the phone came in to return it. That is a big deal for the return policy.