Month of Mario: Mario Teaches Typing (PC)

When computers were becoming accessible enough that they started appearing in homes, a wave of games appeared to help prepare kids for this new future where typing could trump writing. It was a unique position for the edutainment genre, typing being a skill that needed training and a computer would inherently be involved in the training process. While Mario games didn’t normally appear on personal computers, it’s not too surprising Interplay and Nintendo saw a chance for him to ride this educational wave. However, when you’re making an edutainment game, you’re usually trying to tie the learning to some on-screen activity, and while making Mario clear levels by jumping over enemies feels like a simple way to adapt it, Mario Teaches Typing completely wastes its borrowed brand by making his presence feel incredibly superficial.

Before we dig deeper, it should be noted the version that was specifically played for this review was the original 1992 DOS release. A CD version released two years later, but its main additions were an attempt to integrate Mario a little more, although not so much in the educational side. While in the DOS version you’re greeted by a very generic male voice welcoming you to Mario Teaches Typing, the CD version swaps in the man who would become Mario’s voice for years, Charles Martinet. Not only is he voicing Mario on the menu screen, Mario’s floating 3D head will help explain the game’s modes and features. Other than that, there is a small attempt to tell a story with the play in the CD version, Mario and his brother Luigi coming across a floating typewriter and Mario ends up making it explode with his horrendous error-filled typing. The typewriter’s remaining piece implores him to find the other pieces, sending Mario on a quest through a few different areas to reassemble it so he can tap into it’s hidden magical abilities. This manifests as a few animations seen between stages, some slow and boring like the scene where Mario swims away from fish for quite a while while others like Bowser’s castle springing to life to eat the brothers feels like a scene at least worth seeing. Mario Teaches Typing’s original release was focused squarely on the lessons, but it doesn’t feel like too much is lost by playing it because how unexciting the additions to the CD release are.

There are two ways a player can tackle what little there is on offer in Mario Teaches Typing. One is to make a student profile that will track their performance in regards to things like words typed per minute, but playing with a profile will lead to the game trying to force you through a gradual progression so you can’t just click ahead to the later levels. The upside is you can pick your character, and while Mario, Luigi, and the Princess don’t play any differently, it is nice to have some visual variety in a game that ultimately has very little to show. A player who doesn’t pick a profile can freely choose any of the four typing challenges available and is more easily able to alter the difficulty. The game allows you to pick different settings based on how acclimated you are to the keyboard, so someone with no typing experience can start by learning about the keys on Home Row while a more advanced typist can tackle the entire keyboard with numbers, symbols, and capitalization all integrated.

As for how play and learning actually manifest, the four different modes offer different ways to train. The first stage, Mario’s Smash and Dash, is definitely the worst for a few reasons. In this one, your characters will run forward, coming to a stop when there’s a turtle in their path or a block overhead. A letter will appear on whatever has made Mario come to a halt, and by pressing that key, Mario will either bash the block or knock the turtle onto their back. While these Koopa Troopa turtles have the appearance of enemies, if you refuse to type anything, the characters will stand in place until the timer runs out, meaning there’s little pressure to perform well in this first mode. There is a display at the bottom that shows you which finger you’re meant to type a letter with to help beginners, but this level also tends to focus on the same letter or two over and over, the attempt to ingrain it through repetition not the cleanest since you can easily hunt and peck and still hit the WPM requirement needed to continue onto the next stage.

Mario’s Wet World Challenge feels like it at least musters up a proper typing challenge for someone just learning the keyboard layout. Here you’ll be typing out short words, and while there is repetition, the game does continue onto new ones quickly enough that the repetition doesn’t feel like it’s wasting time. What’s more, down in the water, your swimming character is actually trying to outpace a pursuing enemy. Whether it’s the rather sinister looking take on a Blooper squid or the large fish Boss Bass with a set of new sharp chompers, these redesigned yet familiar foes aren’t as threatening as they seem. They can, technically, catch up to Mario and force a level failure, but even a slow typist who gets the letters right a third of the time will likely outpace these enemies, meaning the stakes are minimal and your typing mostly just exists to speed up your character’s constant swimming in a loop across the screen. This level and the first do sometimes feature a rare punctuation mark that briefly appears, and if you type it, your character will go off to do a quick run through coin heaven, but this is essentially pointless too since it’s not like you have a score besides the WPM, letters typed, and errors being tracked. Mario’s Wet World Challenge is just about actually trying to type for a certain amount of time before you move onto the last mode formatted like a level: Mario’s Tunnel of Doom.

Inside what appears to be Bowser’s Castle based on the CD version’s story, Mario’s Tunnel of Doom actually provides the best and most interesting typing challenge yet, and it’s as simple as typing out normally phrased full sentences. Often taking the form of trivia about things like professional sports, the sentences you write out aim to cover the gamut of all the keyboard can offer, the player’s WPM rating actually feeling like it matters here since you’re typing out real information instead of hammering the same keys repeatedly. The trivia also gives it something interesting to pay attention to, since once again the animations of your character running through the stage becomes stale incredibly quickly. This time, Mario must run across a hallway with three Thwomp enemies waiting to come slamming down to block his path if you’re too slow. The game won’t block your path if you get too many errors, but that will weaken your WPM and the game expects you to finish a string of sentences in a certain amount of time to clear each Thwomp. Mario patiently stands in place as you type though, his antics not exactly exciting viewing since even once he gets going he’ll just shuffle forward a bit to his next standing point. If you clear the Thwomp room though, Mario then finds himself swimming through quicksand, it still not too dire in terms of how well you need to type and the view worse since your character’s mostly submerged, but it does at least mean the game has two scenes to loop through for a level that can put up a fight against young burgeoning typists.

The last mode, unfortunately, is incredibly dry, Mario’s Expert Express tossing away even the limited animation and framing so it’s essentially just one long endless worksheet. You see the words you need to type, again presented like they were in Mario’s Wet World Challenge, but the only thing here with any character is Mario’s face at the top that gets happy or sad based on how well you’re doing. It’s easy to call this the least interesting mode, but the truth is, the other modes really aren’t tying the typing to some secondary action well at all. The characters moving on screen are pretty much only in danger if you’re a particularly slow typist,  and simply showing which finger to use for home row doesn’t feel like it pushes the player into the right typing style for quick writing on a keyboard. Mario’s Tunnel of Doom comes closest since realistic writing is more demanding in terms of quickly hitting the keys you need, but Mario Teaches Typing doesn’t really want there to be consequences for failure often or even much in the way of rewards for success. Seeing your character constantly swim forward isn’t really a strong motivator, and if you have no emotional attachment to the Mario characters, the novelty of their presence can’t shield you from what amounts to very basic typing exercises that don’t really spur you to improve.

THE VERDICT: Mario Teaches Typing sees Mario and his world implemented into an edutainment game in a barebones inconsequential manner. The typing barely relates to the bland action cycles shown on screen because there’s no true goal beyond continuously typing until a clock runs out, and even the levels willing to fail you for not keeping up are too lenient so it doesn’t train you to be much of a speed typist either. You’re just typing to make an animation repeat itself, and while typing out sports trivia in the hardest stage can at least lead to you learning something, otherwise levels feel hollow because this game is basically standard schoolwork that couldn’t even muster up a convincing disguise.

And so, I give Mario Teaches Typing for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. A better name for the game would be Mario Trains You To Type Consistently since an on-screen indicator of which finger to type with hardly feels like true teaching, especially when the game can’t adequately punish or reward you based on whether you’re actually typing properly. If Mario Teaches Typing was more willing to tie its action to the typing, then you could start to make the player realize the value in using Home Row as you could need that to keep up. Right now, the game causes a level end if a Blooper catches you or a Thwomp slams down, but the game could have chosen to be stricter to add some excitement while giving you a few chances to pick up the pace or improve. Another possible way to actually motivate the player would be some true progression, whether it be actually building up a score or just getting to new content beyond that quicksand screen in the tunnel level. The rewards don’t need to be extravagant, but besides seeing your character moving more quickly, there’s barely any impact tied to your actions save for dodging that rare failure condition. Looking back at what actually happens in normal Mario games could have helped too. Mario’s Smash & Dash is just one long brick road, but if there was variety and you could try to type more advanced things to maybe get power-ups or take different paths, you’d find things more engaging than hitting the same few keys over and over until the timer runs out. That could interfere with the WPM goals, but those also feel like a lazy form of judging progress since, as mentioned before, hunt and peck methods could often clear the low hurdles Mario Teaches Typing set.

Games in the Mavin Beacon Teaches Typing series were able to tie game mechanics to typing challenges with some success, so it’s not like the similarly named Mario Teaches Typing had an impossible task. It didn’t need to make the action actually hard to keep up with either, but it certainly should have made it feel like you had a true impact on what was happening on screen to make the typing drills actually entertaining. You shouldn’t be finding the sports facts more entertaining to learn than the part of the screen where video gaming’s most famous character can be seen, but he’s elected to barely do much here so unless the mere sight of Mario gets you excited, this edutainment title will not keep you interested whether you’re actually learning to type or just wanting to play a game with some substance to it.