April 1st hits early
Posted by inpheaux on March 31st, 2006 at 7:22 pm
Ah, April fool's day, the day when another year's worth of hoaxes and pranks to trick the intensely gullible rise up again. There's always been the problem of timeliness when it came to pranks from gaming magazines, as the "April" issue for many gaming magazines tends to drop in February or March, but this year since the first occurs on a weekend, many other sites have posted their pranks a day early.
I really don't like this tradition, as most places do a really terrible job, generally by cobbling together some awful photoshop entirely lacking comedy. A few places do a good job, though so first lets take a look at the good.
ThinkGeek always tends to churn out a mildly amusing selection of fake items, often gaming related, like when they put Duke Nukem Forever on sale. This year, they've got a Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom kit which . . well . . . is a 1up mushroom kit. The product description is quite entertaining, though.
Now to worse: EGM's primary offering that hit stands three weeks ago was nice and hamfisted. HURRR. HURRR. APPLE CONSOLE. ITUNES FOR GAMES. Ehh, maybe I'm just jaded by the fact that it seems we can't go five days without some other new bullshit Apple product mockup. The only redeeming part of this is that they managed to troll the crew over at Engadget with this obvious joke. Sure, they quickly posted a retraction to explain that oh no, they knew it was a joke, but I distinctly recall catching the pre-edit version.
And finally, Blizzard. Blizzard is known for coming up with some of the best April Fool's shenanigans, like their Two-Headed Ogre race for World of Warcraft. This year Blizzard has two offerings. First, from normal-Blizzard, a rather uninspired press release about "BurgerCraft". To make up for this, Blizzard's World of Warcraft comedy division whipped up this new race announcement about wisps. Yes, Wisps. The best part - by far - is the screenshot showing off the character creation screen, featuring a wisp sporting a fashionable beard.
There will, obviously, be more of these showing up tomorrow, each one more amateur than the last. I don't expect any will be deserving of a full report, so I'll just keep updates in the comments.
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