In today’s Friday Fun, I thought it’d be fun to anticipate a forthcoming post on 3D models of the real world and look around for a few games that are set in Google Earth and Virtual Earth 3D, the 3D mapping tools from Google and Microsoft respectively…
Perhaps the most well known game in the Google Earth is the inbuilt flight simulator.
You can find out how to use the Google Earth flight simulator here: flight simulator in Google Earth
As far as Virtual Earth goes, I’ve heard tell that alien invaders are attacking the Open University campus in Milton Keynes, and it’s down to you to stop them: Destroy All Invaders…
To what extent do you think either of this 3D world maps might be used as environments for games in the future? If you haven’t used either of these applications before, take a few minutes just looking around them. How easy do you find it to control the 3D view? Can you zoom in to a point, look up, down, and from side to side?
Digital Worlds - Distorted Reality 
A few more Google Earth games to consider.
GE War, a Risk-like game:
http://www.gewar.net/
Google Earth Football:
http://www.gearthhacks.com/football/
GEMMO, an MMORPG inside of Google Earth:
http://www.gearthhacks.com/gemmo/
Not Google Earth, but a fun Google maps game: the Amsterdam Helicopter Game (via Google Maps Mania) [ http://amsterdam.by-helicopter.com/ ]
The idea is “to fly a helicopter around Amsterdam visiting various bars and restaurants… The address of the bar you have to find is displayed on the screen and its location is shown by a little red dot on the map. When you find the bar another bar or restaurant address appears. If you can’t find a bar or restaurant you can use one of your three wild-cards and move onto the next bar. What’s more you can add any of the bars and restaurants to your list of favourites.”