April Fools Round-up

Well it's time to round up the biggest and best jokes from this April Fools. I do have to apologize for taking so long in writing this post but I wanted to make sure I had scoured the net for only the best in this years jests. This year had quite a few names taking part in the festivities from iconic Google and Blizzard to the smaller Escapist and ThinkGeek. Since there were so many, I'm only going to list the top 3 (in my opinion of course). Well, without further ado, let's get started!

1. Blizzard

The kings of April Fools are back and as usual have spared no expense in trying to fool the masses. While focusing mostly on fooling the denizens of Azeroth, they haven't forgotten about their other IP's. Even digging deep into their archives to bring you Blackthorne 2: Thorne Harder (sorry I can't stop laughing everytime I read that haha) one of the two games that will catapult them into the mobile gaming industry. The other being Queens Quest, a hilarious StarCraft take on the great text adventure Kings Quest. Head on over to Blizzard's announce page for all the details.

Also from Blizzard we have a couple Diablo themed jokes as usual. Firstly is Blizzards take on those ridiculous full body blankets with the Diablo 3 Deckard Cain X-Treme Gamer Blanket. As silly as it might sound, just for pure giggles I probably would actually pick one of these up (I think it's the book that does it for me xD). That's not all from our good friend Deckard Cain though, he's also cooked up a voice pack for your GPS. Now you'll never have to work up the courage to run a red light when you have Deckard Cain telling you that the hordes of hell are driving right up your tailpipe.

World of Warcraft keeps up with tradition by adding the E.P.E.E.N system and the Battle.net Neural Interface. As if players in WoW didn't have enough to make newbies feel insignificant, Blizzard thought it good to add in the E.P.E.E.N (Equipement Potency EquivalencE Number) system. Basically every time you get a piece of gear it adds to your score, higher scores put you in higher tiers. The higher you go, the more bonuses you get, like a larger ignore list and a higher change to roll high on your need/greed rolls, and also anyone who isn't in your tier can't talk to you, so no more getting whispered for gold in Orgrimmar! As for the Neural Interface...well the photo below speaks for itself...

Also if anyone was checking their Armory over the past few days would have noticed that everyone in Azeroth was a Tuskarr (oh the humanity...)...

2. YouTube


While there are far more April Fools jokes on YouTube than I can probably count, there are 2 highlights. First up we have a trailer for Team Fortresses take on Law Abiding Citizen with Law Abiding Engineer. While the other is something I kind of wish they would add as a permanent feature. If you looked at a couple game trailers on YouTube over the past few days you might have noticed the option to turn the video into ASCII (an image comprised completely of text, see below).

3. Penny Arcade


The great web comics themselves have dived headfirst into the festivities by announcing their second attempt at gaming. The worlds first web comic based fighter. While not exactly something April Foolsish as I'm sure this game would actually probably sell, I know I'd like to pit Gabe against Leo from VGcats (rat morning-star FTW).


There were plenty more where these came from, if you want to see the entire list of gaming related pranks, head on over to Kotaku and enjoy!