Geoguessr

Ok, I have no power over my compulsion to play Geoguessr. The game is insanely addictive for people of a certain type. I found out about it through xkcd:

This shows one of the pitfalls of the game. This experience is nowhere near as uncommon as you would think.

This is my best score so far, using every cheat imaginable (basically Google) and having some luck as to initial location. If you want to try to beat the score (stop looking at the map!), click here. Yes, the game has a challenge mode…and it now has a timed mode which I haven’t tried. If you’re feeling particularly smart you can try staying in place just spinning around to determine where you are. This is much harder as Finland looks a lot like Minnesota and Australia looks like Botswana. Also the Canary Islands exist. I can score around 12000 points if I’m lucky in that mode.

My tips so far:

• Unless you speak Russian you will need to have a cyrillic character map open to translate signs as you wander around, even though they don’t have many actual street signs. Thankfully I know hirigana and katakana.
• Portugese is spoken in a many places that are not contiguous.
• It sucks to be plunked down in a desolate stretch of outback. You may get carpal tunnel clicking for miles until you see a sign of some sort.
• Google streetview still has some very low resolution sections. This makes the game a lot harder as you need to find really big landmarks.
• Sometimes the cameras are dirty.
• The interior of China and most of Africa and South America (with the exception of South Africa and Botswana, Brazil and Venezuela) isn’t mapped yet.
• Svalbard has been mapped.

I almost had to do work this morning as the Geoguessr site was down, but it’s up now so I’ll stop typing and start playing. It’s educational! Really.