Did you know that lacrosse is the official summer sport of Canada? Well it is. (I'll give you one guess for the winter sport.) But something tells me that Canada's population of idle kids, teenagers, and twenty-somethings won't be playing much this week, since Pokémon GO was just released in the Great White North. Players on Android and iOS can now download the game directly from the Play Store and App Store, respectively. It's a good thing they did release it in the summertime, since it's hard to hunt for AR monsters while trudging through snow and ice.

Niantic's augmented reality take on the classic Nintendo RPG has become a worldwide phenomenon in just over a week, despite the fact that it's still not available everywhere. The game has shot to the top of every applicable chart in the Play Store with more than 10 million downloads, and even more conventional news is overrun with stories (both good and bad) of millions of players hitting the streets to catch critters, collect items, and conquer gyms in the digital world. The game is currently somewhat unreliable in terms of server uptime and it's riddled with gameplay and usability bugs, but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone from playing it obsessively.

At the moment Pokémon GO is available in the US and Canada, most of continental Europe plus Iceland and Greenland (but not France, for some reason), Australia, and New Zealand. Major markets yet to have official access to the game include Mexico and Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and pretty much all of Asia... which is odd, since the original Nintendo games were made in Japan and remain extremely popular there. Players who can't download from the Play Store can try their luck sideloading the app from APK Mirror, though unsupported regions may not have any Pokémon or Pokestops for them to play with yet.