If only George Romero had thought of this. Imagine if instead of using rifles to blow open the zombies' brains, the characters trapped in the house of Night Of The Living Dead had run out into the hellishly cold air armed with a computer keyboard and typed the undead into submission. Such is the power of words.
Originally intended as another sequel to the console House Of the Dead to be played on the Dreamcast's keyboard, The Typing Of The Dead finds its spiritual home on the PC. It's still very much a game on rails but, instead of playing with a plug-in laser gun, you use the PC's natural weapon: the QWERTY board. Through a series of episodes you rid towns of their zombie infestations by typing the words that appear before them as fast as you can. Small creatures only require one letter, while end-of-level bosses need whole paragraphs to be written. The really great thing about it is that as words get longer and more complex and you find your fingers stumbling all over the keyboard, the game simulates the nightmarish frustration, despair and anxiety you would probably feel if you were being attacked by waves of zombies in the street. Not only do you need to type faster to stay alive, there is the moral imperative of trying to save the people around you. The consequences of bad spelling are dead innocents being ripped to pieces all around you.
The graphics are pretty poor but, if you're anything like us, you'll spend most of your time looking down at the keys rather than at the screen. TTOTD is probably the first game where, instead of finding cheats on the Net when you get stuck, you need to hire a secretary and, as a typing teaching tool it beats Mavis Beacon to a bloody pulp. After playing, I wrote this review in just under two minutes. Thank God for spellcheckers, though.
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