Experdize Spanish Police - Applied

How to play: you are on patrol in Madrid City — its streets and landmarks. The roads, their names, the buildings and the places all come from OpenStreetMap, so the street signs on your map are the real ones and nearly all of them are in Spanish. The car drives itself: it follows the satnav, stops at lights and signs, and pulls in at the green ring. Your whole job is the Spanish.

Five kinds of shout, and the car moves when you answer. Control sends you to a road accident, after a speeding car, to somebody trapped and needing rescue, after a suspect in hiding, or to a pedestrian who needs help. Which shout it is decides what you have to do when you arrive.

1 · Where is control sending you? The call comes over the radio in Spanish — Un sospechoso se esconde en el templo., "a suspect is hiding in the pagoda" — and a row of four appears. Pick the kind of place and the car is routed there. Get it wrong and you really do drive to a hotel; control tells you so when you arrive, and you go 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 hospital hospital, market market, hotel hotel, park park, school school, station coach station, cinema cinema, and temple a pagoda against church a church — the pair this game is worth playing in Madrid for, because a Buddhist south with a French cathedral in the middle of it puts both of them in the same streets.

2 · What has to be done here? This is the question the game is built on, and no other game in the course asks it. At the scene a row of four verbs appears — arrest the suspect arrest the suspect, call an ambulance call an ambulance, rescue the casualty get the casualty out, give directions give them directions — and the one that is right is the one that fits the call you were sent to. Four of the eight share the syllable rescue, so reading the words around it is the whole exercise: an ambulance, a rescue, first aid and a tow truck are four different answers to somebody lying in the road. A wrong verb is still carried out and the scene is still cleared; what it costs is the commendation, your streak, and being shown the verb you should have picked.

3 · What does the ticket come to? On a speeding call the second question is a number instead: the driver asks ¿Cuánto es la multa? and you pick the fine off a row of four, in euros. The wrong answers are built out of the mistakes Spanish numbers actually turn on — doscientos cincuenta against doscientos quince, which run together at speed into very nearly the same shape; and sesenta, against setenta, sixty and seventy differing by one letter in the middle of a word nobody says slowly.

4 · Which way did the satnav say to turn? The banner says Cincuenta metros luego gire a la izquierda. — "left in fifty metres" — the car stops, and a row of four appears: gire a la izquierda left, gire a la derecha right, siga recto straight on or dé la vuelta turn around. Pick the one the instruction said and the car makes that turn. Pick wrong and it really does turn the wrong way, which costs you time and nothing else — the route works its way back — and the satnav tells you which word it said, so you find out you had gire a la izquierdahee-reh ah lah ees-kyair-dah and gire a la derechahee-reh ah lah deh-reh-chah the wrong way round rather than only that you ended up somewhere else. There is no arrow on the banner, on purpose: an arrow would answer the question before you had read the word.

Get one wrong and you are told the answer. Whichever row it was, what you picked and what was right come up side by side — the Spanish, the say-it and the English, at every difficulty, because an answer you still cannot read is not an answer. The consequence stands: the car 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 watch is ten reads — five calls, a place and a job 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 car, 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.

Everybody on the street is a real model. The person who called you in, the suspect, the speeding driver, the pedestrian and everybody on the pavement are cast from the same catalogue of 3D bodies the rest of the site uses, and the patrol car and every car around it come from the site's own fleet — you pick which one you drive on the Patrol car row of the setup card.

Level and Difficulty are two different rows. The five levels — Primera ronda, Conociendo la zona, Hora punta, Conociendo la ciudad, Turno de noche — are how hard the watch is: busier streets, longer runs, 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 say-it and the English under every sentence, Intermediate the say-it alone, Advanced the Spanish by itself. 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 car has to stop; the autopilot obeys them, because a police driver who takes a red light on an ordinary call is a police driver in trouble. The car cannot leave the road — the kerb holds it in. Clipping another car costs the commendation and marks the bodywork, and that is all it costs: nothing here ends the watch.

2D or 3D is the camera.C — or the camera button — steps three ways of looking at the city. 3D chase, behind the car, 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 every one of those names is another line of Spanish to read — the street names on your map. Q and E crane you round to check a junction.

Everything is spoken as well as written. Control and the people at the scene each talk in their own voice, and the Voice slider in the sound menu governs both. A machine with no Spanish voice installed simply stays quiet and the game plays exactly the same read; the line under the map says so if that is you.