Experdize Mandarin Taxi Driver - Applied

How to play: you are riding a cab in Beijing or Xi'an — the roads, their names, the buildings and the places all come from OpenStreetMap, and in these two cities they are all written 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 Chinese.

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

1 · Where do they want to go? They say it in Chinese — 我要去博物馆, "I want to go to the museum" — 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 shopping centre; 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 车站 station, 博物馆 museum, 酒店 hotel, 公园 park, 医院 hospital, 商场 shopping centre, 剧院 theatre, 寺庙 temple and 古迹 historic site.

2 · Which way did the satnav say to turn? The banner says 前面五十米左转 — "left in fifty metres" — the cab stops, and a row of four appears: 左转 left, 右转 right, 直走 straight on or 掉头 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, so you find out you had 左转 and 右转 the wrong way round rather than only that you ended up somewhere else.

3 · What does the meter come to? At the kerb they ask 一共多少钱？ and you pick the fare off a row of four. The wrong answers are built out of the mistakes worth making — 十二 twelve against 二十 twenty is the same two characters the other way round. 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 pinyin 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 — 初级, 中级, 高级, 熟练, 精通 — 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 pinyin and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the pinyin 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 these two cities those names are more Chinese to read. 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 Chinese voice installed simply stays quiet and the game plays exactly the same read; the line under the map says so if that is you.