This piece of homebrew is probably the most ‘different’ piece of homebrew I’ve ever tried because to check out how it works, I had to actually get up from my chair and move around! Perhaps Vitamon GO is part of some secret plot by VitaHEX to make us move around more while playing on our Vita! :p

What is Vitamon GO?

As the title suggests, it’s an AR game that aims to be similar to Pokémon Go, the game that many people went crazy after in the summer of 2016. Pokémon Go lost most of its user base after a couple of weeks but it showed us that AR games, a concept that some companies had been experimenting with when the Vita and 3DS were new, is something that lots of people are interested in messing around with.

Some game-play of Vitamon GO!

While Niantic didn’t release a version of Pokémon Go for the Vita (and I don’t blame them), thanks to homebrew developer VitaHEX, we can enjoy an AR experience on the PSVita. Vitamon GO is a homebrew game in which you have to catch random monsters with the Poké Ball (or just ball?) at your disposal. The game has the following features:

• In the game, you can enable ‘AR’ mode in which the monsters are placed randomly within the field of view of your rear camera! You can either press ‘X’ or the touchscreen to catch them.
• There are 3 monsters as of now, none of which are from Pokémon. VitaHEX doesn’t want a copyright lawsuit but maybe someone will create a hack that’ll go under the radar; the source code is open-source anyway.
• You can also see a monster list (à la Pokedex).

The monster list in Vitamon GO

As with all of VitaHEX’s work, the game is written in Lua and is interpreted with Lua Player Plus.

Conclusion

It’s important to note that this game is still in alpha stage (v 0.1.0) so it’s not that useful right now although I still think it can be some fun if you take your Vita out to the park and play around a bit with it. I hope that this game gets more updates and possibly Pokemon characters (through some hack) because I personally think it has some potential even with not that much work!

If you have any issues, report them to VitaHEX (big_Sakis25) on the Wololo /talk thread below. This game is available on VitaDB so you can get it directly on your Vita through VHBB.

Vitamon GO /talk thread: https://wololo.net/talk/viewtopic.php?f=116&t=48745

VitaHEX’s Patreon (if you wish to buy him a beer or two): https://www.patreon.com/vitahex

VitaDB link: http://vitadb.rinnegatamante.it/#/info/353