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I’ve been hanging out with Desktop Goose and he’s the best kind of encouraging turdHONK
HONK
We all loved playing as the horrible goose inUntitled Goose Gamelast year, but Sam Person’sDesktop Goosecompanion has now given me a taste of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of that terrible honking machine. The goose is, as you’d expect, a monster, slapping his tiny feet all across your monitor, dragging in goose-related pictures and notepad messages that he’s apparently typed with his own feet, and if you try and shut them down he’ll come after you and bite your mouse cursor.
Desktop Goosehas been out for a while, but it’s one of the many hundreds of games now available as part of the stupendously good valueItch Bundle For Racial Justice And Equality, which has just ticked over an incredible $7 million. But the goose isn’t all bad. Occasionally he’ll bring you notes of encouragement saying you’re doing a good job, and it actually made my heart swell to one hundred times its normal size. Thank you, desktop goose, you’re all right.
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To be clear, Desktop Goose is, for the most part, incredibly ominous. When he first waddled onto my desktop, it wasn’t long before he pulled in a notes saying, “i cause problems on purpose” and “mess with the honk, you get the bonk”, and I was starting to regret ever hatching his little batch file into existence. Even worse, he’d peck at my mouse cursor if I tried to close any of this text and pictorial based handy work, which is not especially helpful when you’re trying to get a day’s work done.
He reminded me a lot ofHypnospace Outlaw’s Professor Helper character, who you can download from the game’s HypnOS directory to act as a kind of Microsoft Clippy kind of character to help you navigate its pages and get advice on how to use HypnOS most effectively. Only he’s not a Clippy-style office assistant; he’s a horrible in-game malware program that floods your HypnOS terminal with adverts, viruses and other online nasties until you pay to have him removed.
But as I said, he’s not all bad, and it actually warmed my heart to have him tell me I was doing a good job, and to see him drag that message into view so I’d definitely see it. Sure, he quickly followed it up with another ‘looking for trouble and if I cannot find it, I will create it’ meme, but I think he meant what he said. Or typed. Or honked. Whatever the appropriate word is. I do wish he’d wipe his feet before wondering off and bringing me another message, though. Maybe he really is a terrible goose after all…
