I'm not sure what I was expecting when I downloaded the new
Mavis Beacon patch. Unlike the others, it was labelled a "
point release", and the usual icon was in blood red. The installer had some creepy horror-movie music as well.
After finishing the installation, rebooting, and starting the program, I was greeted with an entirely new interface. Gone was the school/library background, replaced with that of a dungeon. Blood dripped from the menu options. This was not going to be another normal typing session.
Lesson One
Instead of the usual lessons ("Type out these words in sequence, etc"), I was presented with a whole new challenge. Hold down W, A, S, and D in various patterns, all while hitting various numbers and clicking the left mouse button. As I'm left-handed, this became tiresome, so I cheated by switching the W/A/S/D keys to my arrow keys. The rest of the lesson was time trials... instead of a percentage bar, your progress was represented by a maze, and "targets" that you had to click on, or, as the program said, "fire" at. I'm still a bit confused as to what that was, but whatever. In the span of an hour, my recorded time improved greatly, and with a grand flourish, I was allowed to move onto the next lesson.
Lesson Two
This seemed like Lesson One intially, until I realized that the maze was now a series of rooms, with stairs, ladders, and all sorts of odd things. Also, in what I was told was an attempt to greater improve my typing accuracy, I could only "fire" on certain "targets". These "targets" had speech bubbles over their head. As I'd already acclimated to Lesson One's challenges, this would be easy. I quickly learned, though, that Mavis will go to extreme measures to improve my typing skills. Whenever I "shot" a "target", some text would appear on the top of the screen. It would be anything from "DAMMIT!" to "TYPEKILING WH0RE!" to "fagg0t!", and the insults grew more profane with every special target that I clicked on. Eventually my record was immaculate on this lesson, as well.
However, I was dissapointed to find out that there was no third lesson included in the patch. My next essay in school was an utter dissapointment, riddled with errors and misspellings. I was also banned from several of my favorite Quake servers, for unexplained reasons. I suppose this experience was just a mystery for the ages.
How's my noding? /MSG dokool