The Weekly WTF: ‘Mario Teaches Typing’

Mario, you poor bastard. As the poster boy of Nintendo's cutesy, rainbows-shining-out-of-everyone's-assholes gaming world, you've been subjected to all manner of horrors. Appearing in over 200 games, not to mention lunchboxes and tampons and McDonald's patties of death... it's a hard life.

There is nothing, nothing ever, that this guy hasn't been pimped out for. Even --hold on to your balls-- edutainment. Are you ready for the craptastic that is Mario Teaches Typing? Because it's coming at your eyeballs right now.

We could be pernickety here. We could mock, like the mocking mocksters of mock that we are. We could say things like, why in holy hell is Mario teaching English skills? The man's vocabulary consists of about ten words, and several high-pitched screeches of excitement. That hairy-assed green dude that lives in the trashcan on Sesame Street would be a better tutor. But we won't.

Anywho, yes. Feast your eyes on this craptacular MS-DOS/Mac OS game from the early nineties.

At the outset, Mario is indeed as hopeless a typist as the urchins that Mario Teaches Typing is edutaining. So much so, the typewriter he's dicking about with in the game's intro explodes (presumably in protest at his dumbassery). Floating in the air in its place is the message FIND ME, and a image of the Magical Typewriter in pieces. Along with his lanky loser of a brother, he sets out on a quest to recover said pieces and develop his typing skills.

If that little slice of shite isn't plotting at its very best, we don't what is. As Hollywood blockbuster material goes, it still beats the half-assed Bob Hoskins movie.

What follows is a try-and-hold-your-bowels-in thrilling romp through the alphabet. It's a simple business, with you merely copying the text displayed on the screen to advance the story (which is, as we've hopefully made clear, an epic of The Da Vinci Code cliffhanger-y proportions). You'll auto-stomp goombas and koopa troopas, auto-kick Bowser's ass... they've shoehorned in as much of the usual Mushroom Kingdom hokum as possible.

We can't bitch too much about this, nevertheless. We're sure that bringing the Mario effect to tedious topics must help a little with the whole edu-ma-cating thing. Not being the target audience, we shan't judge. Well, any more.

All we know is, B is for Bowser is the kind of thing more of today's schools need.