ROCKINGHAM — Although the streets aren’t filled with as many Pokémon Go players as last year, the cellphone game still has some Richmond County residents out and about.
Wednesday afternoon, Antwan Page, of Hamlet, was standing in front of the Daily Journal office where he had just caught a few of the digital pocket monsters, including a Pidgey and a Wooper.
“I never really come to downtown Rockingham…not really this part,” he said. “I work at Perdue, so that’s as far as I really go, besides Walmart and Bojangles and places like that.”
Page said he hunted a little last year, when the craze swept the country.
“I think the best thing I caught was a Dragonite, and it was down by the (Rockingham) fire station,” he said. “The most I’ve hatched was a Snorlax…that’s about it. That’s about as good as it gets for mine.”
He said he recently started playing again a week ago, after the latest update.
“They added some evolutions they didn’t have before, so that’s what made me kinda come back,” he said.
Page made the trek to Rockingham after someone posted that they had caught a Charzard.
“I would love to catch one of those,” he said, although he hasn’t seen any. “There’s a lot of Charmanders up here. I guess maybe they caught a bunch of ‘em and just evolved it.”
Having grown up playing the Pokémon card game and watching the cartoons, Page is sort of reliving his childhood.
“I had a lot of cards,” he said. “My parents bought me a lot of cards when I was a kid. My brother played it, too. They bought me a deck, they had to buy him a deck, and then we traded…a lot of the decks didn’t have the exact same cards, so you could trade and get a few better ones.”
He also played — and still plays — Pokémon Blue on his Game Boy Advance, saying it was his favorite of all the Pokémon games he played — because it was the only one he could catch a “legendary” character on.
But with the new game on his phone, he combine his love for Pokémon with a little bit of fitness.
“If you’re a Pokémon fan, you get to walk and catch Pokémon like you used to want to do when you were a kid, do a little bit of exercising — unless you’re kinda lazy and just sit in the car,” he said. “A lot of people just sit in the car, but it’s easier just walking. You burn a few calories and catch a few Pokémon that you always wanted to have.”
Page still watches the cartoon from time to time — although he doesn’t like the new series as much as he thought he would — and is already trying get his four-month-old daughter interested in it.
“It would be nice…to have common interests,” he said. “Our first common interests.”
Reach William R. Toler at 910-817-2675 and follow him on Twitter @William_r_Toler.