Death by Typewriter

I've spent some time today playing an old computer game that I've not played for years. Possibly one of the daftest (in a good way) games ever made: The Typing of The Dead. It's basically exactly the same game as the lightgun game House of The Dead 2 but rather than shoot zombies with guns you... er.. you type at them on a keyboard. For example a zombie might appear with the word "rabbit" displayed in front of it. All the player (ie me) has to do is type the letters as quickly as possible before the zombie attacks. And each letter sounds like a gunshot. Bang bang bang bang bang bang. More powerful monsters have longer phrases. Little ones might just have single letter to type.

I think the game was originally put out on the Dreamcast, possibly only in Japan, but I have the PC version. This has led to a very surreal design decision on the part of the makers. Virtually all the in game graphics are identical to those in House of the Dead 2 except for one change. Rather than the lead good guys carrying guns around with them, they now have keyboards strapped around their front and a Dreamcast strapped on their back Ghostbusters stylee. So this means that rather than the keyboard just being a substitute for a gun for gaming purposes, it has also replaced the gun for story and visual purposes too. It's just plain odd.

Despite the inherent weirdness, the game works really well and is lots of fun to play. And it even has a proper touch-typing tutorial mode too in case you start having too much fun.

I'd quite like to see a version of Saving Private Ryan with the same replacements. The beach landing scene would be hilarious. I suppose there'd be a further level of incredulity caused here since Dreamcasts weren't invented until 1999. But then Tom Hanks isn't really a soldier either (no, really - he isn't) so maybe you could put it all down to the magic of the movies.