1380: Suffer Like QWERTY Did?

There’s a new Typing of the Dead game out.

There’s a sentence I never thought I’d have the opportunity to type truthfully, but here we are on October 29 in the year of Our Lord 2013, and there’s a new Typing of the Dead game out.

Lest you’re unfamiliar with Typing of the Dead, allow me to explain.

Sega have a franchise known as House of the Dead. Originally, it was one of those big-screen arcade machines that you and a friend point plastic guns at and pretend you’re blasting zombies. House of the Dead and its various sequels were notorious for having some of the worst voice acting ever witnessed in a video game, but also for being fun light gun shooters that didn’t take themselves too seriously.

The Typing of the Dead, which came out in arcades in 1999 and was followed a couple of years thereafter by Dreamcast and PC ports, was a… varation on House of the Dead 2. Specifically, it replaced the light-gun shooting aspect with what essentially amounted to a series of touch-typing challenges — zombies would shamble towards you with letters, words or phrases attached to them, and in order to defeat them you’d have to type out their letters, words or phrases before they reached you. As the game progressed, the things you had to type got increasingly complex and silly, culminating with a final boss fight in which the ending you got was determined by how honestly you typed out the answers to a series of questions you were presented with.

The Typing of the Dead Overkill, which came out today, does for House of the Dead Overkill what The Typing of the Dead did for House of the Dead 2. In other words, it’s pretty much the same game, only you type things out instead of shooting them. And it’s glorious.

I never played House of the Dead Overkill when it came out as a Wii and PlayStation Move-based shooter — lightguns have long gone the way of the dodo — but I was dimly aware of the fact that it was Sega taking the inherent silliness of House of the Dead and turning it up to the maximum, producing a game that is refreshingly unafraid to be completely offensive to absolutely anyone and everyone as often as possible, but which underneath its boobylicious, foul-mouthed exterior, is an immensely enjoyable arcade game of the old-school variety.

The comic juxtaposition between the amusingly mundane things you’re typing and the profanity-laced dialogue going on the in the background is hilarious, plus I can’t not like a game whose three difficulty levels are “Bitch”, “Agent” and “Motherfucker”. Aside from the humorous aspect, though, Typing of the Dead Overkill seems to be a solid game underneath, too; there’s lots of secrets to find in each level, which you need to grab by hitting the Tab key when you see them on screen in the environment, and a combo-based scoring system rewards you for being as accurate, skilful and quick as possible, so there’s plenty of potential for enjoyable high-score chasing.

The voice acting isn’t quite as bad as that seen in the original House of the Dead games, but while the actors involved are now clearly professionals, it’s pretty clear they’ve been told to ham it up as much as possible. The characters — including the original House of the Dead’s hero G — are broadly-painted stereotypes who all call each other “bitch” and “motherfucker” all the time, and the whole thing just revels in its childishness. It’s refreshing.

Also, I’ve just discovered that the game also includes all of House of the Dead Overkill for those who want to play a traditional lightgun-style shooter. Bargain.