Typing classes used to consist of a tightly wound old man or woman standing in front of a gloomy high school room filled with old typewriters. You sat rigidly in the hard plastic chairs, fingers properly positioned on the keys. You kept one eye on your prompt and the other on the thick ruler wielded by the frustrated typing maven, who could turn violent quicker than a rabid skunk. Once in a while, when you paused to crack a knuckle or flex your aching joints, your fingers would be whacked by that ruler. You learned to just keep typing.

The Typing of the Dead faithfully recreates this pressure to learn while going a long way toward making it fun to type. The game contains a number of tutorials and typing drills designed to teach you the basics of touch typing and to offer plenty of practice for the main event. Your coach is James, the AMS Special Agent you play in the game itself. Although he lectures you on proper finger positions and what-not like any good teacher, all of his speeches can be cut short with a tap of the Enter button. This feature alone makes James the world’s best typing teacher.

Once you’ve learned and practiced the proper finger positions, it’s time for carnage. Imagine House of the Dead 2, complete with references to the infamous Curien case, only instead of a gun you’re armed with a keyboard (attached to a "Dreamcast" battery backpack). That’s right, in the cut scenes you and your fellow AMS teammates are shown packing keyboard-guns. When the game gets going, you revert to first-person point of view, and as the zombies shuffle forward, you have to type a random phrase in full before they get close enough to eat you. Each correct letter you type is a direct hit, which means that as you type the zombie’s arm explodes, then its chest caves in, then its head bursts, until finally you finish the phrase and the zombie melts into a puddle of green, bubbly slime. This is even more satisfying than it sounds.

The levels become progressively more difficult, with opening levels marked for "absolute beginners" and the finale for "typing prodigies." The game itself has an options menu in which the overall difficulty can be set anywhere from Very Easy through Very Hard. The number of baddies doesn’t change, but the phrases get a lot more complicated. I personally learned to type the "wrong" way, which is a modified form of hunt-and-peck that is often as quick as touch-typing but isn’t nearly as pretty to watch, and which often necessitates looking at the keyboard. Even though I type the "wrong way," though, I’m not a bad person, and I can hold my own on practically any difficulty setting. The game itself always encourages touch-based typing by subtly changing traditional phrases ("One tough kookie") or sprinkling in rarely used words ("Hopping hydrangea"), making it difficult to look back and forth between keyboard and screen. At the highest levels on the highest setting, it would be impossible to beat the game without almost exclusively touch-typing. Perfect keystrokes are further encouraged by the bonus system, which awards extra lives for typing a lot of phrases in a row without missing a letter.

Typing zombies to death, then typing their level bosses to death—that’s pretty much how Typing of the Dead goes. There’s a rudimentary storyline concerning good old Goldman and his nefarious, corporate-sponsored schemes (this time he’s pissed about humans tampering with nature, and he aims to stop that nonsense for good). However, the storyline isn’t what sells this game. Nor are the graphics, which improve nothing upon contemporary console games. And although I don’t know how the voice acting here compares to that of the House of the Dead series, I can say Typing didn’t blow its budget on top quality actors. If anything, the voice actors here are doing dead-on impressions of the world’s worst performers. Yet, ironically, this is where the game starts getting good.

You see, it’s just impossible that the people at Empire Interactive accidentally put graphics this bad together with voice acting this horrible in a game about typing zombies to death. The Typing of the Dead effectively functions on a few different levels. There’s the typing-tutor level, which appeals to people who want to learn touch-typing but don’t want to sit through tedious classes. This is the same impulse behind a grammar book I read once that used sentences about macabre sex to illustrate all its points ("The vampire licked her chest clean, he savored every ruby drop of her blood" is a comma splice). And then there’s the level of pure kitsch appeal, requiring players to read this game as they would watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show or listen to Def Leppard’s Hysteria. The kitsch appeal relies on audiences accepting the notion that bad acting, mediocre graphics, and quirky game controls are artistic forms in their own right. If you think like this, then you’ll be able to both laugh at The Typing of the Dead and enjoy it on its own terms.

And the game is ultimately quite enjoyable. There’s something liberating about killing zombies not with guns, not with ingenuity nor puzzle-solving skills, but with words. It invokes mythological concepts of gaining power over things by knowing their true name, or cliches about the pen being mightier than the sword. Killing zombies with words provides the illusion of an intellectual exercise, and this is one of Typing of the Dead’s less obvious strengths. When people ask why you waste so much time playing video games, now you can tell them that you’re actually learning to type. Then you can ask when was the last time they learned a new skill.