Experdize Vietnamese Police - Applied

How to play: you are on patrol in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City — Bến Thành market, the cathedral, the Independence Palace and Đồng Khởi. 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 Vietnamese. 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 Vietnamese.

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 Vietnamese — Nghi phạm đang lẩn trốn trong chùa., "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 bệnh viện hospital, chợ market, khách sạn hotel, công viên park, trường học school, bến xe coach station, rạp phim cinema, and chùa a pagoda against nhà thờ a church — the pair this game is worth playing in Saigon 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 — bắt giữ nghi phạm arrest the suspect, gọi xe cứu thương call an ambulance, cứu hộ nạn nhân get the casualty out, chỉ đường cho họ 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 cứu, 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 Phạt bao nhiêu vậy chú? and you pick the fine off a row of four, in nghìn đồng. The wrong answers are built out of the mistakes Vietnamese numbers actually turn on — hai trăm mười lăm against hai trăm năm mươi, which differ by a tone and nothing else an English ear can hear; and ba trăm linh năm, where the skipped place is spoken and dropping the linh turns 305 into 350.

4 · Which way did the satnav say to turn? The banner says Năm mươi mét nữa rẽ trái. — "left in fifty metres" — the car stops, and a row of four appears: rẽ trái left, rẽ phải right, đi thẳng straight on or quay đầu 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 rẽ tráireh chai and rẽ phảireh fai 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 Vietnamese, 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 — Ca đầu, Quen đường, Giờ cao điểm, Thuộc thành phố, Ca đêm — 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 Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese to read — Lê Lợi, Nguyễn Huệ, Đồng Khởi, Hàm Nghi. 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 Vietnamese voice installed simply stays quiet and the game plays exactly the same read; the line under the map says so if that is you.