On this day I wake up anxious. It's awful, the jokes aren't funny anymore, I'm not sure they ever were. Electronic Gaming Monthly once told me Sonic and Tails were coming to "Super Smash Bros. Melee." I wept for days. And then I wept in sadness.
The April Fools day jokes have to stop, not just for the incremental spurts of joy followed by hours disappointment in my youth, but because I never have, and never will, visit gaming websites and developer blogs for their consistently juvenile and weak sense of humor. You aren't funny, and just because one day a year you're given permission to try, it doesn't mean you should. Give me the opportunity to say "you're better than that," but so far none of you have.
First up on my hit list - the developers and publishers. Today's highest-profile offenders are Square Enix and Ubisoft, the latter of which I'm not even sure yet if they're joking.
Last night hints at a new "Deus Ex" title starting popping up. Turns out it's a total hoax, a simple 8-Bit trailer of a fake game "Deus Ex: Human Defiance." And I think I hear more sighs than laughter, but the worst part is we've all just taken part in a market study over interest in another "Deus Ex" game. If it were any other day, Square Enix's blatant lies would be taken as ill-suited and unethical, but today's manipulation is supposedly just a cute joke.
And then we have the "Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon" debacle. "Blood Dragon" is almost certainly a real thing. It's been classified by the Australian ratings boards and a list of achievement have popped up, but Ubisoft chose this awful day to finally put out something "official." It's a faux throwback marketing website for a "movie" called "Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon," which Ubisoft may intend to use as a jumping point for a real game announcement sometime in the future. In poor spirits due to the day, I find myself hoping this whole thing backfires. And there's a chance it will. Any gamer who visits the website will associate "Blood Dragon" with April Fools, even if the site is for a fake movie and not a fake game, and any future announcement about the title runs the risk of being taken as a joke as well. Ubisoft, in its attempt to utilize April Fools for some real marketing, may have just dug itself into a hole. I'd roll my eyes if it all wasn't so pointless.
That's the worst part. I can't take a joke anymore. It's too much. It's too many times. It's too expected and terribly executed.
And then there's the gaming news websites, IGN in particular, who just can't seem to get over themselves about the whole thing.
IGN's abomination for the day is a fake video announcement of the "iPLay," an Apple gaming console launching exclusively with "Angry Birds" games. It's almost sad, IGN mocking Apple, seeing as how the behemoth tech company has single-handedly changed the news they cover over the past five years. It's desperate, unfunny and a waste of everyone's time.
You want to know the real joke? Up there next to the fake iPlay story is a real "Poker Night 2" announcement from Telltale Games, and half the commenters below the text think it isn't real. Wait a second... maybe it's Telltale's joke, maybe the press releases then sent out are fakes, even though the news story is real.
Isn't this fun? Isn't this just so much fun?
But maybe I'm just a cranky fool who never got to play as Tails in "Super Smash Bros." At least Sonic showed up eventually.