Microsoft Bids Farewell to XP With a Clever Browser Game

I fondly remember writing up a poorly-written screed on my and my best friend’s old personal website sometime around 1996 that discussed how MS-DOS was better for gaming and Windows 95 was the devil. That attitude seems always to find its way to the top whenever Microsoft forces us stick-in-the-mud PC gamers to upgrade to increasingly obtuse and unintuitive operating systems. Recent dismissal of support for Windows XP has brought those lingering feelings to the surface yet again.

To combat them, or perhaps just to troll, Microsoft has put a sneaky little browser game up for angry gamers to take their frustration out on. As you’d imagine, it’s full of bad humor and images of the infamous “clippy” icon we all loved to hate. The game also refers to XP as a “pestilence”, which is amusing since many users called the lack of a start button in Windows 8 a “pestilence” as well.


Operating system snobbery aside, it’s a good way to kill a few minutes … provided you don’t attempt to play the game with Firefox. Microsoft takes aim at their major browser competitor by way of giving you an error message and telling you to download a real browser, complete with an IE11 link.

Which is odd, considering you can load the game fine with Google Chrome…

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About

Carl is both a JRPG fan and a CRPG'er who especially loves European PC games. Even with more than three decades of gaming under his belt, he feels the best of the hobby is yet to come.


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