The Typing of the Dead, or TotD for short, is a simply hilarious way to learn and train typing for Windows gaming enthusiasts. At the same time, I found that inbetween the laughs I actually progressed well. It's a conversion of the light-gun game House of the Dead 2 where you have to type words and phrases instead of aiming a light ray at the hordes of zombies shambling towards you on the screen. It's all done very tongue-in-cheek, as it should be. While the original games take themselves way too seriously and suffer from poor "Engrish", this game is just excellently (self-)ironic and the stiffness of the original fits in perfectly. Most of the weapons are even replaced with silly versions, so instead of a club a zombie might wield for instance a plunger! I still wouldn't recommend it for the smallest kids though.

   
   Type fast! The alternative is gory death, muahahaaa!  :)

The excellent vintage-game site Home of the Underdogs has a page (warning: Slow site, but functional) with a nice write-up as well as a Torrent of the full game! http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=4973 (I never used Torrent myself, and downloaded my copy before they started using that, so don't ask me how it works technically but I see people using Torrent a lot so it's probably time I got started too.) It runs well under my WinXP; I don't remember any problems at all and I've installed it on a few different machines.

If Underdogs put out a full download like this, then to the best of my knowledge the game is no longer protected by copyright laws (aka "abandonware") so you won't be doing anything illegal. Underdogs is far from those "hacker" sites that put out illegal copies; if there are copyright issues they'll just link to the company instead. Although the site is a bit slow to navigate, I recommend looking around a bit and checking out their "Top Dogs" in particular, as there is much vintage game gold there and these people are true aficionados! I was surprised to find a full version of this game as it's not that old (2000) but at the same time it's based on an old game so I guess it grew old fast? It's still brilliant though!

The game has a typing school that is quite good too. It is based on QWERTY of course, but if you don't mind the "home row" lesson taking place on all rows and suchlike it'll be fine. As a "locality" (Norway) user I had trouble getting the game to understand some special signs because AltGr won't work. I ended up making a layout install for the game, that allows me to type signs in a familiar "Norwegian" way but moves all necessary characters for the game to normal or shifted keys. This solution works perfectly. For US users it won't be necessary.

One thing I really found useful is all the drills in TotD. If you don't want to embark on a lengthy zombie-purging mission you can just do some quick but fun exercises. These each focus on a single out of a bunch of aspects of typing, such as speed/accuracy/reaction (a bit more game-relevant maybe) etc. They're just excellent.

The game has a huge range of difficulty adjustment available in all aspects, so it should fit everyone from the near-beginner to the near-master.

Two thumbs way up! Agents of the AMS, report for duty!