"Where there is typing, there is life." —Mahatma Gandhi

August 13, 2013 4:20 PM

Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing will make you care more about typing than is perhaps healthy or advisable.

Holy Wow Studios created this game in one month for the Something Awful Gamedev Challenge VIII, for the theme "Subversive Edutainment."

posted by overeducated_alligator (26 comments total)

Wow, this is even better than Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!
posted by CrowGoat at 4:45 PM on August 13, 2013

El monstro es feo! No es guapo! No me gusta el monstro!
posted by rouftop at 4:59 PM on August 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

This is at least as good as and maybe even better than the immortal Frog Fractions.
posted by oulipian at 5:00 PM on August 13, 2013 [6 favorites]

Bonus lorem ipsum, if you survive.
posted by persona at 5:05 PM on August 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Typing Tutor IV for DOS still rules. No games, no graphics, just pure heuristic typing challenges. It finds your weak spots and drills you on them. I got up to 115wpm on TT IV on an original IBM PC keyboard. You know, the clicky one. Oh you should have heard the racket. But now that TTIV is gone, my keyboard skills have declined precipitously, to about 90wpm.
posted by charlie don't surf at 5:06 PM on August 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I feel gross now.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 5:07 PM on August 13, 2013

I don't believe I just played through that. Was pretty good though.
posted by daHIFI at 5:21 PM on August 13, 2013

The little TyperShark parodies/references are pretty funny.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:26 PM on August 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I keep trying to close the browser and Mr. Filcure keeps opening it back up and there's this high keening noise and I mute the volume on my computer but it doesn't stop why doesn't it stop
posted by cortex at 5:57 PM on August 13, 2013 [8 favorites]

Eh, it's no Typing of the Dead...
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:13 PM on August 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Strange Interlude: Nothing will ever be as good as Typing of The Dead, but this a pretty solid typing tutor, and a good parody of Mavis Beacon.
posted by KGMoney at 6:26 PM on August 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

Don't get me wrong, this was a lot of fun too! I just beat up on some nasty lipsums in IPTT's survival mode. (died at 125K with a 28-sec timer) All the same, it's still standing on the (headless) shoulders of giant zombies.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:37 PM on August 13, 2013

I had to do the binary three times.
posted by vegartanipla at 7:41 PM on August 13, 2013

I learned a lot about typing!
posted by moonmilk at 8:47 PM on August 13, 2013

Still not as epic as Ron "Typewriter" Mingo.
posted by jonp72 at 9:30 PM on August 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

Gandhi would have liked the home I grew up in! LOOOTS of typing!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 10:13 PM on August 13, 2013

But can he teach you to do this?

No, I don't think so.
posted by hawkeye at 10:14 PM on August 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

I attribute my success to the effort I invested into getting the right mix of attributes on the character creation screen.

Re Typing of the Dead, I wanted to play that but the only time I saw it in an arcade was the Japanese version, and it wasn't romaji.
posted by aubilenon at 10:30 PM on August 13, 2013

I'm not sure what's so subversive about a "'sperg level" joke in the first minute of the game. Mocking and other people with Asperger's is mainstream.
posted by ShawnStruck at 10:36 PM on August 13, 2013

Super Secret level is vaguely amusing. Decode some binary.
posted by JZig at 11:10 PM on August 13, 2013

That was entertaining, but I was disappointed by the inability to grow lollipops or sell bug porn.
posted by NoraReed at 1:25 AM on August 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

Oh look at that, I'm at the top of today's scoreboard for survival mode.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:30 AM on August 14, 2013

Great fun. Played it last night, and the weirdest thing I noticed, if I remember correctly, is after doing the binary level, which is just 0 and 1 and the space key, there's an exclamation point at the end (shift-1, as you'll no doubt know) and it was like my brain shut down and I had to stop and look down at the keyboard to find the buggery thing. Madness.

Typing contains important vitamins and antioxidants.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:11 PM on August 14, 2013 [1 favorite]

I finished it all with only a couple of failed rounds. I wonder what everyone else did at the top levels, it seems to me you need to be able to type about 80wpm to finish the game. Or did it just set a higher difficulty for me, since I typed that fast in the first round?
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:01 PM on August 14, 2013

I fucking hate that binary 01 level. I have been unable to get through it even after multiple tries.

Can it be because i am using a laptop and have to use two hands for typing 0 and 1?
posted by TheLittlePrince at 10:23 PM on August 14, 2013

Can it be because i am using a laptop and have to use two hands for typing 0 and 1?

Yeah, the laptop doesn't help. Just go crazy fast, hit zero more than one and don't even make accuracy a goal beyond not dying from it.

I wonder what everyone else did at the top levels, it seems to me you need to be able to type about 80wpm to finish the game.

No idea if it changes based on your speed, but the only one I had to redo was the binary.
posted by vegartanipla at 10:48 PM on August 14, 2013