Sometimes, April Fool’s jokes are just boring. Other times, they’re potentially disastrous. Most videogame companies’ jokes are also a little sad—wouldn’t it be great if games were actually as exciting as the completely off-the-wall stuff they talk about doing in their jokes on International Bad Joke Day?
Sometimes, though, the jokes are good. Here’s the jokes we liked the most:
SUPER TRUCK
The game is actually real- though you have to go through a sign-up-for-our-newsletter process to get the download. But the game is GENUINELY GREAT, so there you go!
SC2 BALANCE MANAGER 2016
Blizzard announced a fake game completely centered around allowing players to balance Starcraft 2. Look: if a stats-managing game-balancing simulator really existed, I would play the crap out of it. It could work a little like Game Dev Story, right? And that game rocked!
GOOGLE CARDBOARD PLASTIC
Okay. The joke is a little dumb. But… yeah. They’re right. VR is not gonna be all you hope it’s gonna be, certainly not at first.
ITCH.IO DOUBLE WHAMMY
Itch.io announced today that they’re instituting Reverse Sales– periods of time where a developer can set their game to get MORE expensive. Ha ha, right, but the kicker here is that this feature is REAL and his HERE TO STAY.
Niiiiice.
But that’s not all. I am not even sure this is an April Fool’s joke but they also submitted the Itch.io installer– a desktop app that manages your itch.io account and lets you download games– to Steam Greenlight. And the first video that runs on that page is an ASMR video about the installer.
Itch, I salute you.
WITCHER 3 HORSE BUG DEPARTMENT VIDEO
CDProjekt released a video today documenting the heroic effort of their Bug Creation Deparment to add bugs to the game’s horse, Roach. Without these bugs, apparently, the horse movement would have been so good that it would have given us all motion sickness. The bug creation department is led by a shadowy figure whose voice has been altered so that we can’t get angry and track him, down, I suppose. But he’s a hero. Those bugs are key, sir. You’re doing the lord’s work.
And best of all, the video ends with an interview with Roach’s “voice actor.” A+ job, CDP.
WAR THUNDER
War Thunder, a game about planes, added a (real!) game mode about pirates. Pirate boats. You are a boat, now, and not a plane. You can actually go play it. I am still trying to do the math on how this was worth it in development costs, and I’m guessing that it definitely wasn’t, so they’ve got to have plans for this mode beyond just a gag.
DARK SOULS III: THE MOVIE
Available on VHS April 12.
CHOCOGO
Uber. for Chocobos.
WORLD OF WARTRAINS
In a tweet today, Wargaming’s Japanese office teased a fake World of Wartrains game. Look. There’s not a lot to this joke, but World of Wartrains sounds like, holy shit, a really goddamn good idea, and I would definitely play a game where i outfit a deadly wartrain and then try to board and destroy enemy wartrains. I would play that. Please-take-my-money-dot-gif.
h/t to gematsu.com for some of the Japanese items! We might add to this piece if we see anything else we like.
