Retrospective: Typing of the Dead
Because I was bored one Wednesday afternoon and only man himself can control his fate. The REALLY BAD DUBBING made my day for some reason.
Typing of the Dead, to the uninitiated, is a typing game based on the House of the Dead engine by SEGA. This was first released for the arcade (yes, with QWERTY keyboards!) then later ported to the Dreamcast, PC (MS Windows) and the Playstation.
You play as James or Gary (one of them AMS agents) who is going after Goldman, a business tycoon slash scientist who is attempting to rule over mankind through a grotesque creation called ‘The Emperor’. The game is typically like House of the Dead, a rail-shooter wherein zombies will pop out of nowhere and attack you while you shoot them… with your keyboard. Zombies will display a word (or sometimes a funny bunch of them like ‘Food goes to waist’) and the player will have to type them as fast as they can before the zombie can attack. The game negates the use of capitalization and the space bar (although words are formatted as such).
The game plays through six stages with increasing levels of difficulty which are recommended to be played by the beginner up to the ‘typing prodigy’. Different bosses will be present in all stages with varying set of rules in order to defeat them (i.e. Players can only type while the boss’s chest is open and vulnerable). I sat through and finished all six stages without breaking a sweat (just a bunch of continues in the latter stages) just because I have been a touch typist all my life (well, since the sixth grade).
Typing of the Dead is a nice game to pull out every once in a while if you’re bored at the office or at home, in need of something funny (hello bad dubbing and funny generated zombie phrases) to while away the extra time. You can even tell your boss/mom that the game greatly improved your typing speed and prowess. Which it will, honestly… imagine frantically typing the answer to the zombie boss’s question ‘Which one is a better date?’ while clawing your eyes out:
a. grandma
b. zombie
c. boy next door
Hmmm. You decide.
One of the few games I have perpetually installed on my PC — the game scales really well too, so you can even run it on dinky netbooks nowadays (YMMV with the associated hand cramps that netbook keyboards provide)!