Tokyo Ingress Cross-Faction Meetup

As I've mentioned earlier, the other thing I did today was attending Tokyo's first Ingress Cross-Faction Meetup. For those who do not know, Ingress is an online augmented reality game by Google where you have to go to different places to capture portals and defend them. (You have to physically be where the portal is.) The whole world is divided into 2 teams — resistance (blue) and enlightened (green) to compete with each other. I am a resistance.

The meeting place for the meetup is the NS Building in Shinjuku. To get to Shinjuku from Asakusa, I have to take the underground Toei subway, and this is where my bad luck (or my ignorance) came in. Transferring between the Asakusa line and the Shinjuku line (both operated by Toei) requires walking between 2 stations, so I assumed that I needed to buy 2 tickets to get there. But later, I found out that I can buy a ticket which will be valid until I get to Shinjuku from the originating station, which is also a lot cheaper from buying 2 separate tickets! On a different note, I've also missed the rapid train because I was too busy checking if the train was going in the right direction or not causing me to have to take the local train instead.

So after a lot of hurdle with the trains, I've finally arrived at the meeting place. Quite a lot of Ingress players were there (around half of them were at the maximum level!). One thing most people have in common is a battery pack to connect their phone with!

This is the NS building. The group in the middle is the early arrivers.

I was also given some stickers!

The plan is to have a battle between blue and green. To make this fair, level 8 (maximum) Ingress agents have worked together to reset all the portal in the area to neutral.

After the fight has started, people separated into small groups to capture, defend and attack as many portals as possible. Talking with other players in the group sharing experiences was very fun as well. In the end, the enlightened (green) has created a huge field a few minutes before the battle ended and won the battle.

After the match has ended, level 8 agents have reseted the portals again to prepare for "drawing" an image by using links between the portal.

The plan is to draw an Android

Everyone working together to create the required links

Unfortunately, during the drawing, it has started raining hard and so the drawing was canceled. On the upside, I've found out about a great app that shows nearly real time rain-status in supported areas overlaid on a map.

X-Band Radar (thanks to growegg-san for the screenshot)

It was then time for me to leave (other people are going to a drinking party — I don't drink and I don't want to end up getting back too late). And this is my second bad luck about the trains today. I took the train from Shinjuku station to Akihabara station in order to board the Tsukuba express. Since I came to Tokyo before and know about the Yamanote loop, I got on it. It was only then that I realize that Shinjuku and Akihabara are on the exact opposite side of the loop (meaning that the train has to travel half the circumference to get there) and the Chuo Line which cuts through the loop from Shinjuku to Akihabara is a much better method of getting there.

Shinjuku is a very busy station

It's nearly half past midnight, so I'll stop here for today. Tomorrow is Monday and thus work continues...