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Perfectly Peculiar Pixels [#8]
š§š§šŖ You can't hit shortcuts if you can't type now can you?!
Igor Kolar
February 16, 2025
There are things one takes for granted when growing up, but I never thought touch typing was going to be one of them. I was recently made aware that this skill is apparently no longer a-thing-you-just-learn growing up. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense if you grow up with your predominant tool being your cellphone, and your gaming āformatā of choice being a console.
Interestingly, game designers have taken the burden of teaching or training the general (gaming) public to type on themselves, in arguably hilarious ways. Having the mental map of the keyboard in your head (outside of wasd adjacent keys), is a critical step in utilizing all the productivity shortcuts we went over in previous issues. But practising it, sure can be amusing with these gamesā¦
When you your shift key is in another castleā¦ Honestly, this is the only one that actually bothers to try and teach you to typeā¦ | If Mario can do it, why not zombiesā¦ ā¦whereas all these other ones are really here for the entertainment value, be it historicā¦ |
When you have a successful mascot, you of course milk it for all itās worth, and nobody in the gaming industry is a greater expert at that than Nintendo. Funny enough, Mario teaches typing, maintains a top 10 position on MyAbandonWare where you can find it, and play it in the browser without even bothering with downloading or DOSbox yourself.
House of the dead is a famous SEGA arcade machine. If anything had a longer shot of becoming a typing game, a light gun game where you remurder skeletons is probably it. Incidentally, also a game so popular itās featured only a few spots below Mario at the same site.
Steampunk because of course there is oneā¦ ā¦ be it historical in its visual theme, with the obligatory steampunk versionā¦ | Itās a common fact that ninjas improve gamesā¦ ā¦or as one of the probably better feudal Japan games of this year |
Kongregate is an old gaming website that had its technology rug pulled out underneath it when Flash was decided to be too much of a nuisance for anyone to take care of any more. Luckily, updates were made so the myriad of games that didnāt make the jump to Steam werenāt lost, and one such game is Clockwords. Offering the additional challenge of not just having to type the words, but also come up with them, itās a great (obviously Victorian) bridge between the ye olde games and the more modern outing.
Done by a studio that has clearly done their homework, and hopefully doesnāt get bogged down with feature creep. Itās clearly learned from all the games that came before it, it offers new challenges in a pleasant, casual tone. A free demo is currently available on Steam for everyone to try.
Have you heard of the Tetris effect?
I shared the story of chatting so much online in my youth, that standing outside at a tram station, I would feel words being typed under my fingers as I would think them in my head. I finally found out this has a name! Check it outā