GPS Mission is a real live satellite navigation game played in real time, in the real world using nothing more than your GPS enabled mobile phone and a sense of adventure. Sign up, choose your mission and set off to find the treasure, following the coordinates you’re given on the map. You can even make your own missions and earn gold. It’s available for the Symbian and Windows Mobile platform (iPhone coming apparently), which covers a fair number of handsets.
From what I can see (haven’t had time to go out and actually play yet) it looks professionally done, and there seems to be an active community built around the game. The mission builder is actually a superb bit of design, and really makes it fun to create interesting and enjoyable missions for others to play, and since the developers are currently giving away a free Nokia N82 for Mission of the Month, potentially lucrative too.
I can see this type of application really catching fire as more and more GPS handsets hit the market. The games are fun, although the real problem they’ve got is the size of the planet. That’s a whole lot of real estate to cover, and get enough games out there for people to play. And good ones too. Anyway this gets my fun idea of the month award. Hope it succeeds.
In GPS Mission the users – you – supply the content. You can look for missions others have designed using the mission browser. Designing missions is creative and may be even more fun than playing them. Go ahead, take a few pictures and use the mission designer to create a compelling mission. If you are not feeling too creative today, you can also go and collect gold that can be found in nearly all areas without missions. But don’t forget: Creating missions will get you gold also when people start playing your missions.
Sounds a little like Parallel Kingdom (http://www.parallelkingdom.com/home.shtml) for the iPhone and Android. I’ve been wanting to check it out, but fear my free time disappearing in a giant, WoW-esque vortex. :-)
Oy, that’s totally scary Mystech. :-)