Email
Ah yes, April Fool's Day – how much more fun it is now that the internet allows these japes to be beamed across the world via every social connectivity service imaginable. And now that we have Wikipedia to tell us that spaghetti trees don't really exist (ha ha ha, it's a classic), we demand more sophisticated japery. We don't always get it, but we do at least demand it.
Anyway, the video game industry is not immune to the charms of this annual attack on the gullible and confused. Here are three examples from yesterday that actually worked, if only because they're lampooning games themselves, rather than the people who tend to fall for April-orientated pranks.
Here goes:
Assassin's Creed
It's been viewed over a million times, so the chances are you've seen this spoof trailer for a Kinect version of athletic action adventure, Assassin's Creed. It has exactly the right atmosphere of po-faced sincerity usually conjured by game trailers – but look at the moves that players have to pull off to control the onscreen character. Really quite amusing.
Best bit: The woman diving through her coffee table.
Thomas Was Alone
This is Mike Bithell the creator of the excellent indie platformer, Thomas Was Alone, trying to convince us that he had the game's simple shapes motion captured for extra realism. Everyone, including the owner of mo-cap specialist Audiomotion, plays it dead straight, but it's extremely silly.
Best bit: When the actor in the box gets stuck on the stairs.
Retro City Rampage
This is so meta! Retro City Rampage is a retro-stylised take on Grand Theft Auto, re-imagined as a blocky 8bit home computer game. So this April Fool video not only pretends that the game has been turned into a breakfast cereal, it's also designed to resemble an eighties TV commercial, recorded and played back on a dodgy VCR! Frankly, there are so many layers of post-structuralist representation here, even Derrida would be baffled. Or you can just laugh at the excellent rendition of poor retro video effects.
Best bit: "You can really taste the graphics!"
;
Comments
2 April 2012 5:32PM
Beaver milk? They must have been watching TMWRNJ; "there'll always be milk!"
2 April 2012 7:24PM
This is my favourite one:
http://store.steamppowered.com/
Its funny because its cruel.
3 April 2012 1:37PM
i'd take issue with this:
if i had the time.
the self aware irony of that video marks it out as very obviously postmodern. post structuralism, although related to postmodernism, is something else entirely...