Originally, I planned on calling this post “I love April Fools’ Day” and then I’d just say “Not. I dislike it very much” but that’d be a dick move. It would bait you into clicking onto this post, trusting me with the assumption that I’d tell you why I like it, only to then be betrayed. I would have betrayed your trust by frankly lying to you. That would have been quite horrible, wouldn’t it? That’s basically April Fools’ in a nutshell. People play pranks on others but most of the time, they just hurt them. Companies bandwagon the “trend” or the “tradition” to be funny and mock their customers. Overall, it sucks most of the time.
In terms of gaming, I noticed that R6 (a game that I don’t play) now has a rainbow event with special skins and stuff… This could be a joke… This could be an actual event… I don’t know but I love it regardless. Originally, Yakuza: Like A Dragon was supposed to be a joke… but then it turned real and from what I’ve seen, it’s amazing. The developers of Armello were being cheeky with “Heartmello”, a dating game where you use your wits, spirit and gold to slay your love interest’s heart… Nolla Games switched all channel names on the Noita Discord to Finnish “because it’s better than before in the spirit of the game”. Apart from that, the people behind Valheim tweeted out about a new species in the game (see below) and while it is fun and games when developers try to be cheeky with that sort of stuff, I actually get kind of excited to play these joke-patches in games… only to find out that it’s not actually in there. I started up Valheim and it’s actually a joke… too bad. Meanwhile, Minecraft actually has snapshots that are different and do… weird things… and you can opt into them.
What Mojang’s doing is great because they have fun ideas that are innovative and interesting but they don’t force you to play with those ideas. You have to install the snapshot/that specific new version for it… and since snapshots are experimental anyways, not everyone gets trolled by it, since not everyone plays on those snapshots. It’s fun and totally fine. It’s harmless. Last year’s snapshot was hilarious with the Infinity Snapshot where you basically had infinite dimensions in the game… Hence, the bar was set quite high. Meanwhile, this year’s update at first sounded disappointing… but I actually love it a lot. Mojang decided to release “Minecraft Plus!” which is a reference to the discontinued “Microsoft Plus!” which was a collection of software to enhance your operating systems with… because computers worked differently back then… So, “Minecraft Plus!” features a lot of screensavers themed around Minecraft items, environments and blocks. There is one where you can watch grass spread over a plain of dirt while another one has a block bouncing across the screen. There is a lot of randomisation going on with these as well, featuring rotating blocks, different seeds, and all of that fun. While this may disappoint people that have seen the April Fools’ Day snapshot from last year, I think that it’s a great addition that hopefully will see many more updates. It’s a free piece of software that you can also just run in your browser. I’d recommend checking it out over here. Quite the lovely little thing!
But from Gaming trends to blogging… I… actually thought about doing something like an April Fools’ review or review parody of sorts… I figured I could jokingly review my blog and be very positive about how I do things because that’d be quite fun, right? I also thought about writing a very serious review… about a game that is very bad where I’d basically just say the opposite of what I actually think…
The issue with both of those ideas, however, is that it harms the little integrity that I actually have. That low standard that I have… I’d hate to see it get lowered like that. Also, I wouldn’t know how to clarify that it’s a joke. And then there’s also the issue of me not actually wanting to recommend Rogue Legacy to you… that game sucks. Hot take or not but I feel like April Fools’ Day is a bit of an old ritual that hasn’t been gotten rid of just yet because industries like to produce episodes, memes, tweets, games, and all of that around the topic. It’s like a holiday except for the fact that nobody actually cares about it. Pranks are shit – and I don’t mean that as in “the shit!” but as in “faeces”. While surely, you can go for some harmless banter and send rickrolls around using that “discordgift[dot]site” link that people have been sending for years where you pretend to “gift nitro away”… but I don’t see the point in doing it specifically on April 1st? Like, why? I mean, if every other day of the year had no jokes or banter at all… and if humour was only allowed on April Fools’ Day, like the Purge but with you pretending to be pregnant or you pretending to break up with your partner… I guess it would be a bit understandable. Specifically, if this was like The Purge, I could just leave town for this day and come back when it’s unfun again… but right now there isn’t really a reason to specifically pull someone’s leg or in the worst case hurt someone’s feelings on this specific day.
And I obviously will not recommend games that I do not like… I mean, I can still review them but even if I were to label it as a joke, there could potentially be people that get the game and may dislike it a lot… and that’s bad, I guess… similarly, I feel like it decreases the value of my other reviews and my opinion in general if I end up recommending a game that I can’t recommend if that makes sense.
Oh well, April Fools’ Day is a tradition that should bite the dust slowly. I completely forgot about it until I saw the stuff on Twitter. Similarly, I just dislike it since it’s somewhat pointless. I don’t know anyone that likes it. I don’t know anyone that looks forward to it… Most people I know either don’t care about it or they dislike it. What do you think? Any opinions on April Fools’ Day or about developers bandwagoning the trend and that sort of stuff? Let me know!
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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