Today is April 1st, better known as April Fools' Day. Today is the day to play pranks on your friends and get away with it by saying, "April Fools!" Today is also the day for gaming news to have the most awesome and outlandish news all year to entertain your customers. For example, every year, Blizzard will announce new games or features in their existing games that are so utterly preposterous that everyone knows it's a complete joke such as the ones on display here. Occasionally, you get things that sound super awesome and would love to have in a game, but you know that's never going to happen. That's the trick to an April Fools' joke announcement is that it can't be something people actually want/are expecting like last year when Capcom announced they were going to un-cancel Mega Man Legends 3 and then because there wasn't enough of a response, they re-canceled it.
Some companies, like Think Geek seem to use the day as both a day to make people laugh (as most of their descriptions and products are already for), but I swear they also use it for market research. They'll have scattered throughout the site a whole bunch of fake products. Some are actually somewhat feasible while others are completely ludicrous. Then a month or so after April Fools, some of the more realistic and popular products actually go on sale. I have absolutely no problem with this because their April Fools' products cover such an array of the bizarre and awesome that I think it's actually very clever to use it as market research.
Then there's the small subset of gaming news that comes out that's actually real. There has been an announcement to announce (which is a joke in and of itself, really) that this year they are going to announce a sequel to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I am super stoked for a sequel for this game, so I really hope this isn't a really bad joke, but then that makes me wonder, why not just wait until April 2nd to make the announcement? Is that one day going to cost you anything? If this is a legitimate announcement, why even take the chance people will think it's a joke? It does not make any sense to me. But in any case, I hope this year's April Fools' Day brings with it some awesome ideas from the Overlords of ThinkGeek and gaming news around the world. Have a great day and be careful about what you trust until tomorrow!
UPDATE: Turns out Eidos DID make a terrible April Fools' Day joke. Way to make fans angry at you.
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