China has basically always been this huge blank spot in normal WorldGuessr because Google Street View barely exists there.
I was messing around with Baidu maps and realized they actually have pretty extensive coverage across the country, and while it is pretty low quality I thought it would be cool to have a WorldGuessr mode for China.
So with codex turns out you can actually make a pretty legit geoguessing experience with it. The coverage feels completely different too. Different road signs, cities I’ve never seen before, weird camera coverage, etc.
“As for region-guessing, if they aren’t blurred the province is written on the back plate, but ofc cars travel. Cities are difficult to tell apart but perhaps the best way is to memorize skylines. Guangxi is extremely karst-y and anything under the Yangtze is green and hilly. The places with river valleys are flatter like Sichuan and areas along the coast. It starts getting properly mountainous starting in western Sichuan an Yunnan and as you go west into Tibet it has that non-Alpine high mountain vibe. Southern Xinjiang is a desert while northern Xinjiang is proper Alpine. Inner Mongolia probably looks like Mongolia. There are some interesting rock formations around Gansu, but the north central part of the country is a desert. I know it gets mountainous near the North Korean border but my impression of Northern China is that it’s flat but I could be wrong. There’s probably more smog there. Hainan is tropical.”
