Mavis Beacon Ate My Brain!

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You may be familiar with the classic Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing* series of software from Broderbund.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original blog entry at: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/08/mavis-beacon-ate-my-brain.html
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This was how I learned how to touch-type :wink:

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Thatā€™s totally coolā€¦

We should continue the product line:
ā€œMultiplication for Mummiesā€
ā€œBiology with Blood-sucking Vampiresā€
ā€œUS History and the Undeadā€

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Great find. I had never seen it until now. Is there not supposed to be any sound? I donā€™t hear anything and there are no files in my sound directory.

Thanks, Scott

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Some gameplay tipsā€¦

  • you do not have to type spaces or capitalization. However, punctuation must always be typed.

  • use ESC to ā€œbreak outā€ of a word or phrase and switch to another one. Until you do this, your cursor will lock on the word or phrase youā€™ve already started.

  • the game dynamically scales the difficulty based on how well youā€™re doing. Make a bunch of perfect phrases and it ramps up to larger, more complex phrases. Make a bunch of mistakes and youā€™ll get progressively simpler words and phrases.

  • you donā€™t need a fancy 3D card to run this game. Even crappy onboard 3D of reasonably recent vintage will suffice.

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Now you can prove how much of a keyboard ninja you are

I find that IM serves that function for me. :slight_smile:

Mavis Beacon isnā€™t a real person. Sheā€™s a logotype persona.

Imagine my disaapointment. First it was Betty Crocker, then Aunt Jemima, then Uncle Ben, then Ronald McDonald, then ā€¦ . At least Orville Redenbacher is a real person. Or is he?

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This is cool. I remember Mavis from my grade school days, she was such a role model.
Anyway, I saw in the screencap that you posted, the word ā€˜fretā€™ and I got to thinking. Couldnā€™t this same idea be extended to a guitar coach? Has this been done to anyoneā€™s knowledge? I envision the coach telling you to play some chord combination and then it can analyze the results and timing to see how you did? There are little digital tuners for guitars so why couldnā€™t you just plug into the computer?

Pat pending

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I teach a number of high school students, and I would LOVE to use this game for my classes (Iā€™ve already started) but I ran into a slight problem:

Each of our fairly new Windows XP computers has an Admin account and a user account. The students can only use the user account, but I have to install using the admin account. For some of the computers itā€™s worked fine on both accounts, for a few I can run TOTD on the admin but not the user account.

Any suggestions? Windows is not my friend sometimes. THANKS! Please email me a response.

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just install the game, burn the installed files onto a cd and copy/paste it over to a non-admin account. make sure you have a no-cd crack though.

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Apparently this game was actually released in Japanese arcades, too. Check out the pictures:

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I actually played that in an arcade in Tokyo about four or five years ago; the best bits were the cutscenes, which perfectly mimicked the archetypal ā€œrescuer helping freshly-rescued would-be zombie victim to her feetā€ genre that we all know and love.

The key difference, of course, was that your character, instead of brandishing a shotgun, was depicted on-screen with a large Sega-branded Ghostbusters-style backpack and an actual qwerty keyboard slung in front of him, hot-dog-vendor-tray style. Priceless.

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Are there any sites out there that focus on tTofD, like in-depth walkthroughs and even patches that change the words that appear? Iā€™ve read now that tTofD2 is in the works.

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Iā€™m starting to hear machine guns shot instead of a shotgunā€¦ It has definitely improved my typing skills.

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Thank you so much for this. I cannot describe the awesomeness. :slight_smile:

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This is totally awesome, thank you for posting this.

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Has anybody been able to find a way to get this working on mac? Iā€™ve found one copy of it for mac that just didnā€™t have enough seeds to actually get my hands on. Is it worth getting a virtual machine running purely for this?

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You might be better off focusing on Typing of the Dead: Overkill which is similar and much, much newer.

It has a neat retro / grindhouse vibe, too.

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I guess I can only shake my fist at the heavens and accept I came too late for some things. Thanks! Iā€™ll check that out. Iā€™ve always been fond of tricking my brain into learning in gamified context.

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They sort of did. My favorite is ā€œThe Texting of the Breadā€ for iOS. Itā€™s very funny.

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