Vodoo Extreme is doing a good work, instead of hiding one joke between real news they simply went in a spree (and the same for Gamespot and Slashdot):
– The first news is about WoW joining Guild Wars in order to patch a solid PvP for the endgame.
– The second news is about John Carmack contacting aliens while working on cell phone programming.
– The third news is about a survey saying that 4 out of 5 gamers want a Phantom console.
– The fourth news details DAoC’s new patch and the final removal of the Albion realm.
– The fifth news is about Prey, an old 3D person-shooter never released, to become a Reality Show on Fox with real mercenaries.
– The sixth news is about Gabe Newell leaving Valve to become the frontman of a Grateful Dead cover band.
– The seventh news is about Epic announcing Unreal 3, where the players impersonates a giant slug fighting clowns.
Blizzard’s joke is also well done even this year (with the related SOE’s “lets be friend”) along with all the forum avatars transformed into gurgling murlocks for the day. A special mention for the european version of DAoC where they announced hibernians walking on rainbows, flying trolls and a localization of the game in greek and latin. While players were ambushed by giant ewoks around cantinas and starports in Star Wars Galaxies and swarmed with ads everywhere in “A Tale in the Desert”. Another mention for Tobold’s mmorpg, in particular considering how badly Darniaq fell for it on the discussion forums, lol!
This while Mourning started to send some beta invites… but forgetting to put the servers online. Obviously they’ll work tomorrow.
(and then there are borderline fool’s jokes, like Final Fantasy XI playing “Shark” music while fishing and WordPress selling-out)
In a not completely unrelated news Blizzard’s other “fool’s joke” that found its way to the forums the least night seems instead confirmed by the players. It’s about an engineering recipe given by a dwarf NPC to craft rare special goggles that would allow the wearer to see other players elf characters completely naked. Which suddenly caused disgruntled players to start a petition on the forums (now closed and deleted by moderators).
There are voices saying the recipe was added underhand about two months ago by a quest developer that was unsecure about his employ after a few “animate” discussions with other designers. The quest was then supposed to trigger today in the case the dev was effectively kicked out by Blizzard as a revenge. But then the dev wasn’t fired and, still, he completely forgot the quest and didn’t remember to deactivate it in time.
Other rumors are about the name of this developer with now a dubious future: Alex Afrasiabi, also known as “Furor”.