biggest accomplishment for me during magfest this year was winning the typing of the dead tournament... huge surprise to me a day or two before the proceedings when I looked at the event roster and found they even had a tournament for it at all. great memories from my first magfest a few years back where I crushed a blunt with the squad in the smoke pit and then strolled into the expo hall, sat down at typing of the dead, and rolled through the whole thing in a single sitting with a rotating set of randos next to me. visceral feeling of sinking into the keyboard; this game is real fun to play high because you can roll your tongue around the words in your brain while you play. imo a lot of typing uses similar thought processes as speaking, including the same propensity for tripping over particular letter combinations. your lips might go crosswise at the prospect of uttering "ignominious" and its jarring hard G smashed against a puddle of weak tongue-tip-against-the-palate consonants and squishy vowels, whereas on the keyboard I fall to pieces attempting those left hand-heavy words like "exonerate" or "quarter". my dad gave me a pirated CD-R of Adventures in Typing with Timon & Puumba when I was a child and unfortunately I lost interest around the time they started teaching that qwer stretch of keys, leaving me somewhat awkward even in adulthood when trying to use anything that requires a left pinky.

playing this game competitively adds an awkward layer of tactics on top of what traditionally is a cooperative experience. at the end of each chapter of arcade play both of the players receives a score based primarily on their speed rankings across each individual prompt that they typed, along with an accuracy bonus, fixed points for each citizen saved, and an elusive "base points" value that I do not quite understand. because the prompts are summed in their totality rather than calculating an average speed for each user, the key way to receive points is simply to beat your opponent to the punch on as many prompts as possible. in encounters with multiple targets this goes from a mere race to something more interesting: which prompt will the opponent go for first? generally they'll chase whoever appears first on their side of the screen, which can make for an easy snipe provided you don't need to clear anyone from your side of the screen first. something more exploitable is the tendency to approach the screen from top to bottom, which actually often exposes one to danger given that usually closer enemies will appear lower on the screen; anyone familiar with house of the dead 2 (which this game directly copies its entire layout and encounter structure from) should recognize this. tackling the lowest prompt on the screen before sniping the second-highest often puts you in a good position to lead your opponent from prompt to prompt, provided that you have the edge in terms of typing speed.

tournament itself was as awkward as one can imagine, with ~30 people crowded around two setups, each running those spongey dreamcast keyboards. players shared credits too, meaning that often a less cautious player could tank the other by chewing through the credits and leaving their rival with none to fall back on in case of a death. rather uncomfortable considering that the game throws some rather questionable situations at you, particularly when it comes to thrown projectiles. in the original hotd2 you could divert your aim from a zombie to shoot one of these down in mid-air, but in totd the player is locked into the first prompt they begin typing without being able to switch on the fly, making dealing with said projectiles near impossible unless each player remains idle when the prompts originally appear. lost quite a bit of health in the final level to this, giving my final evaluation near perfect ratings in every other than "Decision making", where I received an E lmfao

the actual typing challenges really sell the game however, transforming what would be a quirky novelty into a legitimately excellent typing showcase. other than basic design like escalating the length and challenge of the phrases as the game progresses, the game often plays with its phrasing to surprising and occasionally hilarious effect. other than the various sexual innuendos that sneak into otherwise-innocuous sessions of play, there lies hidden modifiers that, when shot, will cause a cascade of phonetically-similar yet entirely-bizarre spellings to appear such as "jurasskicked" or "handkerchiever". late-game stuff also takes some real left turns, from odd references like "ecnalubma" to spelling bee bamboozlers like "otorhinolaryngologist" to a prompt that's literally just "www.sega.co.jp" (this latter one the other finalist and I both completely bombed and had a good laugh about afterwards). bosses are generally fine (the magician fight that penalizes any missed letter fucking killed in both semis and grands), but the best of the bunch has to be tower, the hydra villain. this fight presents questions with multiple answers tied to each one of the various heads on the beast, leaving the player scarce few seconds to correctly identify the valid choice. I always felt confident on this one playing normally, but the tournament was ran on Very Hard, leaving me sputtering each time I had to perform the fight. answering "what decomposes?" with "fossils" instead of "crab salad" in front of an audience will forever be a gash in my pride...