Experdize French Taxi - Applied Driver

How to play: you are driving a cab across Kowloon — Nathan Road from Tsim Sha Tsui up to Mong Kok, and the night markets behind it. The roads, their names, the buildings and the places all come from OpenStreetMap, and Hong Kong maps every one of them twice, so the street signs on your map are the real ones in Chinese. The cab drives itself: it follows the satnav, stops at lights and signs, and pulls over at the green ring to pick your fare up. Your whole job is the French.

Three questions, and the cab moves when you answer them.

1 · Where do they want to go? They say it in French — Au musée, s’il vous plaît. — and a row of four appears. Pick the kind of place they asked for and the cab is routed there. Get it wrong and you really do drive them to a library; they tell you so when you arrive, and you take them on to the right place. Nothing is refused, and the only thing a wrong answer costs is the driving — and either way you are shown the word you should have picked. The nine words are l’hôtel, le jardin, l’église, le théâtre, le musée, la bibliothèque, le marché, la piscine and l’université.

⚠ The little word in front is the lesson. Going TO a place glues à onto its article, and which way it glues depends on the noun: au musée, à la bibliothèque, à l’hôtel. Four of the nine take au, two take à la and three take à l’ — and the last three are the trap, because l’ hides the gender completely. l’hôtel is masculine and l’église is feminine and you cannot tell from looking at either.

2 · Which way did the satnav say to turn? The banner says Tournez à gauche dans cinquante mètres. — the cab stops, and a row of four appears: à gauche left, à droite right, tout droit straight on or faites demi-tour turn around. Pick the one the instruction said and the cab makes that turn. Pick wrong and the cab really does turn the wrong way, which costs you time and nothing else — the route simply works its way back — and the satnav tells you which word it actually said.

⚠ tout droit is straight on and à droite is right, one silent letter apart. It is the commonest way to end up going the wrong way in a French car, and it is why this banner carries no arrow: an arrow would answer the question before you had read the words.

3 · What does the meter come to? At the kerb they ask C’est combien ? and you pick the fare off a row of four — and this is where the counting system French is famous for finally has room to run. Everything from sixty to seventy-nine opens with soixante and everything from eighty to ninety-nine with quatre-vingt, so a reader who stops at the first word cannot tell soixante-cinq from soixante-quinze, or quatre-vingt-un from quatre-vingt-onze. Those are the wrong answers you are offered.

⚠ The fares climb with the level on purpose: the first shift runs in the forties, the third crosses soixante-dix, the fourth reaches quatre-vingts and the night shift goes to quatre-vingt-dix-huit — four words for one number, and the hardest figure in the language. You are paid what you say, never more than the meter, and a wrong figure costs the tip and your streak — and the figure you should have read is shown beside the one you picked.

Get one wrong and you are told the answer. Whichever of the three rows it was, what you picked and what was right come up side by side — the characters, the respell and the English, at every difficulty, because an answer you still cannot read is not an answer. The consequence stands: the cab still turns the way you said and still drives where you sent it. You simply also find out what the word was.

There is no clock and you cannot lose. A level is ten reads — five fares, a destination and a meter each — and it ends the moment you answer the last one. The turn questions are the steering and are not part of that ten. While a question is up the whole city stands still: nobody drives, nobody walks, and nothing is waiting on you. What is recorded is your time and how many you read right. Press R, or the button, to hear anything again — it is free and there is no limit.

You can stop the city yourself. Press P, or the button on the meter, and everything holds exactly where it is — the cab, the traffic, the lights, the instruction's fade and both speech bubbles — so you can read every word on the screen at your own pace and drive on when you are ready. Your time is the one thing that keeps counting, because it is what gets recorded.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The five levels — Débutant, Élémentaire, Avancé, Courant, Expert — are how hard the shift is: busier streets, longer rides, a better-paying meter, and from level three the instruction fades a few seconds after it is said, so you have to read it rather than stare at it. The three difficulties are how much of each line is written down: Beginner puts the respell and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the respell alone, Advanced the characters by themselves. The difficulty is a free choice at every level.

The rules of the road are real ones. Traffic lights and stop signs are live, and the banner turns red when the cab has to stop; the autopilot obeys them. The cab cannot leave the road — the kerb holds it in. Clipping another car costs the tip and marks the bodywork, and that is all it costs: nothing here ends the shift.

2D or 3D is the camera.C — or the camera button — steps three ways of looking at the city. 3D chase, behind the cab, is where the game is played; 3D cockpit is from the driver's seat; and 2D map is the north-up street plan, the only view where the street names are legible, and worth a look because in Kowloon every one of those names is another line of Chinese to read — rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Germain, quai de la Mégisserie. Q and E crane you round to check a junction.

Everything is spoken as well as written. Your fare talks in their own voice and the satnav comes in another, and the Voice slider in the sound menu governs both. A machine with no French voice installed simply stays quiet and the game plays exactly the same read; the line under the map says so if that is you.