Star Goose is a top-scrolling shoot 'em up released for MS-DOS, Amiga and Atari ST, in 1989. The player controls a spaceship, the "Star Goose", armed with bullets and missiles, traversing an alien landscape while being shot at by different enemies. The landscape has "3D" features, including canyons that a player can fly into to avoid enemy fire. The game also has a mode where a player can enter into faux-3D wire frame tunnels to gather fuel and ammo packets. Each level of the game also requires the player go collect six crystals to move on to the next stage.
Most retrospective of the game have said that it was a pretty standard top scrolling shooter, with one or two interesting ideas, but with uneven gameplay and too high of difficulty. From my memories of the game, I would agree: I remember that after clearing the first level, I could never pass the second level. I forgot how much time I spent trying to figure out the "secrets" of the game before getting bored and moving on.
Of course, all of this is in retrospect. It is hard to remember what I would have thought when I first played this game in or around 1990, when the idea of a computer in the home was still science-fiction for a lot of us. It is hard to remember just what I thought at the time, but I was probably incredibly impressed by the immersion of the scrolling landscape and spacy atmosphere the designers managed to display on the limited hardware they had available. Making 3D(ish) landscapes on a VGA Card and music on a computer soundchip are impressive achievements.
Like many of the forgotten games from the 1980s, both on personal computers or consoles, while it has its deficiencies in hindsight, it probably was a whole new world to whoever was playing it at the time.