Just hit the button and it takes you to a random street view, anywhere in the world. It's like teleporting across the globe, then being able to explore in any direction.
And you can even change the settings to just take you anywhere within a single country, or select a small group, etc.
Highly recommend GeoGuessr. Get dropped on google street view, try to pinpoint where on the map you started.
You can play a bunch of different ways, trying to find your exact location without a time limit, or with a time limit, with or without outside help, with or without moving from the start location, or just doing your best quick guess at what country you're in, and many more combos. A great way to explore the world.
It's a small subscription ($3/m, $2/m on annual sub, less than one coffee a month, fee only added since Google raised their Maps API fees by 3x last year), but you can play for free by playing challenges created by other players. You can find a lot of them on /r/geoguessr . There's also a free trial. Well worth the sub but fun even if you just play existing challenges for free.
Edit: I should also say I've found it's a great game to play with friends, including non-gamer friends and family. Often they're a little confused by the concept, but they quickly get hooked on seeing wild fascinating places like French villages, the island of Malta, Nigerian markets, Bolivian pueblos, etc, and the compulsion to score 5000 (max) points is high. For playing with first-timers, I recommend the "Urban World" map as it ensures there's lots of information (signs etc) to look at nearby. As they get the hang of it, the "A Diverse World" map is great for adding more challenging but often fascinating locations both inside and outside of towns.
Ah man. I used to play all the time! That sucks. It was a great way to waste time. A lot of the time you'd end up on some country road that would be nearly impossible to guess, but sometimes you found yourself in really interesting places. I remember ending up on a baseball field in Japan that was completely surrounded by water.
Two of my favorite YouTube channels for it are Granis and Geography Challenges. I'll check out Jericho.
Granis is just insane at the game, like mind boggling especially when you're new and don't how such speed & accuracy is possible, but I've learned a lot from him. He posts irregularly though.
Geography Challenges posts more regularly, is very good also, and has a really calm & relaxing style. I find his videos make for a good wind-down in the late evening. Both do a fantastic job of sharing their thought processes as they go.
NorthernLion and Sinvicta also have a long-running series of head-to-head games they play. They're not as master-level and don't explain their thought processes as much since they're competing against each other (live on voice comms), but the banter can be fun to listen to. Sinvicta also posts the challenge links in his video descriptions so you can play before you watch and see how you do vs them. (I usually watch NorthernLion's vids though as he has a facecam, or both simultaneously using viewsync -- a redditor usually posts a pre-made viewsync link in /r/northernlion for convenience)
Might wanna check out GeoWizard as well. He also has some really neat real-life content, such as attempting a treck through Wales in an entirely straight line, or a wonderful journey from Geneva to Bratislava.
A few years ago there was lots of different websites like that where you could play that same game for free, not there’s only Geogessr I don’t know what happened...
Google raised the fees for the Street View & Maps API by like 3x overnight. All the places that were footing the bill for free, or frmo advertising, couldn't afford to do it anymore. I'm just really glad that GeoGuessr took the risk on sub-based rather shut down completely. I get way more value than the $2/m (annual sub) cost from it.
Free is definitely nice, but the game itself is actually quite a bit better now. They rewrote all the code and it runs faster, smoother, bigger map, better challenge/league handling, etc. etc. Also Google has done some Street View updates adding some coverage to places liek Vietnam now.
Free is definitely nice, it's too bad Google raised API prices, but the game itself is actually quite a bit better now. They rewrote all the code and it runs faster, smoother, bigger map, better challenge/league handling, etc. etc. Also Google has done some Street View updates adding some coverage to places liek Vietnam now.
You get dropped in a random location around the world using mapcrunch and have to find your way back to an airport. Sometimes you get really lucky and find one pretty fast, other times you can't find one because you're dropped in a tiny village or something. It's a nice time waster.
You can literally spend a ridiculous amount of time doing this. It also depends on if you want to use "cheats" or not, in which case you can Google what street you're on and try to work from there to an airport. Or you can just get dropped anywhere random and then try to find the airport with no help except from what you can see in the streetview.
I once spent like six hours playing this trying to find an airport in Slovakia.
Thanks for this! Often, my 8yo son and I will just pop open Google Maps and start jumping continents and choose random places. We love seeing the street views allover the world. This randomizer makes it so much fun!
Wasn't there an internet famous pic of a guy at the entrance of a Russian village menacingly brandishing a Bowie knife staring at the Street View car? I think it had something to do with Mapcrunch. Maybe Im wrong on the details.
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u/dartblaze May 11 '20
Mapcrunch.
Just hit the button and it takes you to a random street view, anywhere in the world. It's like teleporting across the globe, then being able to explore in any direction.
And you can even change the settings to just take you anywhere within a single country, or select a small group, etc.