Spooky Review: The Typing of the Dead

[IamLEAM1983]

In the mid-nineties, Light gun arcade cabinets were everywhere. You can still find them here and there, usually in overpriced movie theaters that try and double as arcades. In Quebec, at least, the occasional teen-friendly or teen-themed establishment might pack a pinball table or a cabinet of some kind. In any case, they've outlasted their actual prominence, but there used to be a time where Light gun games were definitely a thing.

Of that era, smack-dab in the middle of the nineties, House of the Dead is one of the better-known and most widely remembered titles and series. The setup is as bare-bones as the genre allows : the evil Doctor Curien is planning to unleash his army of zombies upon an unsuspecting populace because of... reasons, and it's up to AMS Agents Thomas Rogan and “G” (yes, that's his name) to try and stop him. He's also quite conveniently kidnapped Rogan's fiancée, Sophie.

The only noteworthy mechanic is the gun itself or, in the PC's case, the mouse. Pulling the trigger on the cabinet or left-clicking fires a shot, while lowering your weapon and right-clicking both reload your handgun's chambers. You're on rails for the most part, stuck clearing the screen when faced with the undead menace, and moving only when the game moves you. On occasion, you're presented with a minor fork in the road, to give you some vague sense of choice. No matter what you'll do, you'll fight the same bosses based on the Major Arcana of your typical tarot deck. It's a series that has attained cult status because of its quaint and enduring coolness factor, but also because of its hilariously bad dialog and script. Japanese is translated almost verbatim into English, so where the scared waifs you protect from shambling hordes should scream “Get away!”, what actually comes out of their mouth is “Don't come!”

Which is grammatically correct, yes, but also all kinds of awkward for native or borderline-native speakers of the English language.

The thing is, I never played House of the Dead. What I'm going to review is both exactly this very game, and something else entirely. What I really want to talk about is The Typing of the Dead. Incidentally, this game helped me more in terms of my English words-per-minute count than any Mavis Bacon-sanctioned clerical bullshit where you spend hours typing F and J with your forefingers.

All you need to play The Typing of the Dead, its sequel, or the recent Grindhouse-themed Overkill, is your keyboard. Where you'd fire bullets, you'll instead type words, sentences, or rare individual letters. Each keystroke acts as a bullet, with incorrect ones making your metaphorical gun jam for one precious second. The more mistakes you make, the more the dead creep closer and the more the rail shooter's static sequences become harrowing. You're ruthlessly pushed towards excellence while being asked to type occasionally hilariously random tidbits. Spelling out “Crock pot” to take down one of the pot-bellied undead seems kind of on-the-nose to me. In any case, your typing accuracy and speed both get a severe workout, because later levels involve the game making zombies jump-scare you inches away from the screen, with “I went to the market today” being what you're asked to input in order to dispatch them.

That's twenty-six characters, spaces included. You have mere seconds to input that, and the other encroaching deadheads all have longer sentences hovering over their chests. You must be quick, you must be precise. There's no time to waste actually looking at the keyboard because if you do, you're dead.

Of all the games in the series, I'm especially quick to reccomend Overkill. The Wii port has updated HD graphics, a Grindhouse-slash-Robert Rodriguez aesthetic that almost cancels out the HD treatment with the number of cigarette burns, discoloration and scratches the visuals sport, a story that's so convoluted and stupid it's impossible to take it seriously; and a dishy brunette who, in pure Grindhouse tradition, is named Varla Guns. You'll save her with your keyboard because as one of the game's typing prompts put it, “Guns are for pussies”.

How can I not love this? It's formative (if not educational) and it's sleazy! The default dictionary is packed with Pop culture references to other games and horror movies, and you're entirely free to replace it with a custom set of words and phrases, depending on what you'd actually like to type or on the types of characters your keyboard actually supports. I've found a dual French-English dictionary online, for instance, and you have no idea how much we French-speakers can waste time trying to wrestle accented E's, A's or E-umlauts from uncooperative typesets... It means more work but of course, shouldn't be the task of mowing down insensitive corpses be actually difficult?

Maybe I'm just masochistic in some weird clerical sense.

Of course, all games of the Typing of the Dead variety offer you the option to switch back to light gun controls, so you basically get two games for the price of a very cheap one. I consider that as a nice reward mechanism after hundred-percenting one of the later levels.

You haven't missed a single word or space in over an hour? Nice work, champ. Now go back to the first level and use your gun for a coupla minutes. Go and feel good about yourself, why don'tcha?

Then you can switch back to your keyboard and keep going. In a sense, the game's toughest boss isn't any weak point-laden model in the actual experience, it's your own words-per-minute count.

I swear I shall defeat you, you puny 45 WPM!

If there's one downside, it's that the concept of weak points doesn't translate too well to a typing-based game. With a gun, there's no prompt telling you to shoot CHARIOT's head and then its torso. You have to find ways to dodge the guy's attacks and suss out what you're supposed to be doing on your own, which adds to the challenge. With a keyboard, the game is obviously obligated to throw you a bone in the form of a word or a sentence to type out, so all weak points lose their purpose. Unfortunately, all games in the series continuously refer to them as “weak points” even though, y'know, the game spells 'em out to you with a handy-dandy giant sentence to type out.

So when Doctor Curien and the other insane maniacs that followed in his footsteps rage because you've somehow foiled them, it's somewhat hilarious. Like I said, though, this really ain't no BioShock Infinite. You're killing (or re-killing? Destroying?) zombies and that's all there is to it.

It's Halloween and things fit. Failing that, go hit Netflix and watch Planet Terror. It's got Bruce Willis in the most involved makeup job he's ever been in and Quentin Tarantino's CGI dick falling off in clumps. Oh, and Rose McGowan with an MP5 instead of a right leg. Awesome.