Suffer Like WASD Did?
0Originally recorded: March 13, 2025
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Woof, this ended up being a lot tougher than I expected. I played through The Typing of the Dead: OVERKILL years ago and did fairly well at it, so I figured that going back to the one that started it all -- despite being based on The House of the Dead 2 -- would've been something of a cakewalk. Apparently, I was wrong. Hell, I guess those of you fond of witticisms could even say that I was DEAD wrong.
By default, you are given 5 credits and three lives -- which really serve more as hit points -- to clear the game. To make things even easier, you can start from any of the first five levels, which is probably the only reason I managed to beat it in the end. Fortunately, Bacon was a good sport about letting me use every advantage the game gave me to my advantage... which is what allowed me to beat this one in the first place.
That being said, I also had things working against me. I'm not sure if it had something to do with the manner in which I was playing the game or even just my own keyboard itself, but there were a lot of cases where inputs seemed to be dropped. In a typing game like this, that's a big no-no. Because it essentially means that you're playing from an extreme handicap -- especially if such an issue is inconsistent and can't be predicted. I did originally consider playing the PC version instead of the one on Dreamcast, but given how old of a game that is, there were some other issues with regards to presentation that I didn't particularly want to deal with.
In the end, I ended up giving up on Arcade Mode and switched to the home version's exclusive "Original Mode". It's more or less the same, but there are a few extra bonus features which make things a bit more interesting. For starters, you can obtain new single-use power-ups which are mapped to the F1-F4 keys once they're collected. More importantly, by completing specific objectives in each stage, you can unlock upgrades to the main game. In my case, I managed to get 10 coins, which gave me the first two: the option to set my starting "lives" to 5 -- the maximum allowed in game -- and the ability to start a run in Original Mode with two Molotov Cocktails at the ready.
Another unlockable I didn't get allows you to increase your credits from 5 to 9, which is unlocked at 15 coins. You can also unlock the ability to start from the final level with 20 coins and a free play mode with 25. There are also passwords you can use that would unlock these by default, but I figured it would be less of a cheat to unlock them legitimately via gameplay. Honestly, if I'd failed to beat the game when I did, I probably would've tried grinding for more coins on the earlier levels, if only because I'm sure I could beat the game properly with extra credits.
I'd absolutely love it if SEGA put the first two Typing of the Dead games on GOG, ideally with the kind of upgrades that stuff like the Resident Evil trilogy and the first two Dino Crisis games got. I'd also want them to do a TotD based on the latest arcade game in the HotD series: Scarlet Dawn. I was a bit disappointed that the recent HotD remake from Forever Entertainment didn't incorporate a typing mode, if only because playing light-gun games with a mouse is kind of... well, lame. That being said, the upcoming remake of HotD2 looks like hot garbage. I hope they delay it to fix things up.