This Wednesday, Niantic finally announced that a whole new cast of Pokemon from the Johto region would be available to capture within Pokemon GO (Free), as well as an assortment of additional items, berries, and gameplay enhancements to make the augmented reality application even more immersive. While they touted a release date of ‘later this week’, it turns out we didn’t have to wait long, as this landmark feature for Pokemon GO is now available straight within the game (a preparatory patch was released earlier today, and has to be downloaded before Gen 2 fun can begin). You now have no excuse to turn your cap backwards, grab your Poke Balls, and go out into the freezing Winter morning and capture some brand new Pokemon from the Gold, Silver and Crystal games!

In case you missed the initial announcement, this update includes the aforementioned 80+ creatures from the second generation of Pokemon games, as well as all the new evolutions for many of the previous cast of critters you may have caught – for example, that Golbat can now evolve one step further into a Crobat. All the new evolution items that are required to evolve Seadra, Scyther, Porygon2, Onix, Slowpoke, and Poliwhirl are also now attainable from PokeStops, and the Pinap and Nanab Berries make their debut, slowing a Pokemon’s movement and doubling candy obtained from a creature respectively. Some neat UI and AI improvements to make capturing Pokemon even more immersive are also included, and top off what is an incredibly exciting update for Pokemon GO, and one that hopefully brings a lot of disillusioned trainers back into the fold. Download the new Johto update for Pokemon GO on the App Store now, and let us know what you think of the abundance of additions on our forum thread.