I am especially proud of myself for figuring out that I was in the Russian city of Perm.
(It was the curly hair on the locals that gave it away).
I am especially proud of myself for figuring out that I was in the Russian city of Perm.
(It was the curly hair on the locals that gave it away).
:bah dum tssssk:
Anyway, I’m laying down a challenge:
My score: 29203.
Google allowed?
Since Google is the only way to get a score that high, I used it. Four of the five were easily googled almost immediately.
I got 27577.
Because I had no real clue on C. I’d be curious to know what was seen in that one (it has a very limited range in which you can roam) to allow for Googling.
My friends and I have been using these rules and I find them more fun even if it means I’m happy to be within 200km instead of 200 feet: No Google, No movement. Just pan and zoom from the spot you’re dropped in.
On C:
The crane at the north end of the bridge has a legible company name on it. It’s not a very big construction company, and the work they’re doing isn’t all that far from home. Enderw24 guessed near their office, I gambled a bit based on the terrain and went the wrong way.
I don’t know how you all get so close on the guesses. I seem to always end up in rural Australia with all the signs blurred.
I just did one that placed me in the middle of a flat, dry , landscape with some mountains in the distance. There wasn’t a building in sight and not so much as a car on the lonely dirt road. Finally, a school bus passed (!) and it read Baker School District 27. Googling it, it was Baker, CA, just west of Las Vegas. I went about another mile on the same lonely dirt road before giving up and making a guess just outside of Baker. I was 100km off. It was just north and west of Palm Springs.
About 28200 with no Googling on Enderw24’s challenge in about an hour. On C:
I believe the line below “Tioga Construction” on that crane is a city and state. It looked to me like the state abbreviation ended with I. I figured that since MI and WI were right next to each other, that somewhere between them would make a good guess; however, I felt silly putting my guess in Lake Michigan, so I ended up guessing somewhere in the middle of MI’s lower peninsula. For the others: A was easy once I went east out of town and saw the Pomeroy, WA and US 12 signs.
B was easier, since it had like 2 highway numbers and 3 control cities almost within sight.
For D, I knew Longyearbyen was on Svalbard, which I learned about in one of the His Dark Materials books.
For E, once I saw the BC Tourism sign on the nearby building, my first guess for a northern shore that was semi-populated but not urban was Vancouver Island. I couldn’t find the town on the guessing map at first glance, though; I had to travel the 5 km or so to Highway 19 to convince myself to look at the shore again in a tighter zoom.
I just noticed the game I linked to in my last post was a bad URL – sorry about that. Here it is again in challenge mode – I think it should work this time (at least the link’s gray and goes to the right place in preview).
29370, but it took me almost 45 minutes.
On C:
I missed the crane sign, but further down the road toward the sun is a road sign for what looked to me like Whitekill Falls State Park. Pretty blurry. After googling, I just hoped it was Stony Kill. Still not sure what it says, but I lucked into the right general area.
Here’s a fresh challenge – all 5 with googlable clues … I scored 32286 – all five within a km.
32379 on Kimble’s, but I used google.
That’s what I used, all right. I knew it wasn’t correct, because my location was in the country and the home office was right in the middle of a metro area. But I didn’t see anything else to go on to get closer, other than random guessing.
Just discovered this “game”-- Yikes! This is FUN-- and seriously addicting. I don’t use Google. Takes away the sport for me.
I also tended to eschew Google, but if I’ve got time these days I’ll often use it. You’re aiming for different targets - over 12,000 is good if you’re not using google, but anything under 30,000 is disappointing if you are.
When I tried it I got many of the countries right, but with a Portugal <–> Brazil substitution. (I know zero Portuguese and very little Italian but can usually guess those languages just by comparison with Spanish.)
Based on a feature near my home I’ve wanted to start a different sort of guessing game, but have no idea how to define it. I don’t know how anyone would locate the feature in that link without a supercomputer scanning Google Map’s data. (If you do find it, you’ll have found my secret location!) (BTW, I was aware of that feature and had even driven around it, but was still surprised to see how prominent it appears in Google Maps.)
Time to hang up my mouse. Just got 23,949! GeoGuessr - Let's explore the world!
I did get four urban scenes and only one BFE. That helped a lot. And I did use google. Okay, fine. Still, a very good score.
Anybody have a clue what the scoring system is? I finally go one exactly right* and it gave me 6479 points for it. I kinda expected a rounder number …
*The entrance driveway to Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley - didn’t even have to google it.
OK, now that we’ve played for a while, how about the opposite challenge: Who can rack up the lowest total score on GeoGuessr? Presumably this will involve figuring a location as precisely as possible and then figuring the antipodal point from that location. Good luck!
I just got one right smack in the middle of CityWalk at Universal Studios. I thought this is easy and hit Orlando. It was the one in Los Angeles. Doh!
The site (still at http://geoguessr.com ) has been updated since I last played, with specific city or country maps to narrow you down. Also, it puts me in Vietnam a lot more than it used to, so I suspect it’s been expanded to include more areas.
Is anyone here still playing this? I just discovered this game this week, damn it’s addictive.
The strangest starting location I’ve had so far was inside some kind of pornography museum in India. Inside the museum, mind you!
It seems pretty easy to perfectly nail any location in the USA as long as there’s an interstate or major U.S. highway nearby. Getting pretty good at Mexico, too. (Europe’s a nightmare, and I don’t even wanna talk about Australia or Brazil…) Unfortunately there’s still a bunch of horribly low-rez, mashed-potato-quality images on GSV which are too blurry to read any signs; usually I’ll just reset if I hit one of those.
I’m very tempted to start using Google or Wikipedia for stuff like telephone area codes; but that seems like a slippery slope.