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USB PC Prankster: guaranteed to freak out, enrage your cubicle mates
Oh, brother. As we all know so well, the office can be a draining place. But devices such as these could make even the most burnt-out middle manager excited to clock in. The USB PC Prankster looks like a stock flash drive, but as you can clearly see above, a few toggle switches enable it to become quite the headache. Once plugged in, the unlucky PC that it's attached to will have its Caps Lock enabled and disabled at random, see garbled text splattered about quarterly reports and be victim to uncontrollable, erratic cursor movements. Thankfully, the drive will never activate the Enter key nor close or save documents, so you can rest assured that it's all in good fun. Turning your office up on its head costs just £19.99 ($33), but you'll have to wait a tick 'til it comes back in stock.[Via Switched]
Rock Band: Radiohead isn't real, is real funny
According to our precise calculations, roughly 10 gazillion versions of various Guitar Hero and Rock Band games now exist. And even though Radiohead has done its fair share of appearing in rhythm-music games over the years, Break.com does a great job of portraying an entire game based around an exaggerated version of the band. The music reminds us more of a mix between The Cure and Sigur Rós than Radiohead, but the statement made by the idling girl, who says, "Depressing songs about math and fish get me hot," pretty much sums up our feelings exactly. Warning: If you take Radiohead (or yourself) really seriously, you might not want to watch the video embedded after the break.
If Microsoft made a toaster...
We don't know where, and we don't know why, but we sure like the idea of this Microsoft toaster that etches little Redmond flags into delicately baked slices of Wonder. Of course, if Microsoft really did make a toaster it would likely require an upgrade to your bread. And if Apple made a toaster, the bread would be non-removable. Oh!And if... go ahead, add your own in the comments below.[Thanks abrahamvir, images courtesy of mazw220]
Valve jokingly tips hat to MMOs in latest Team Fortress 2 update
Team Fortress 2 from Valve is one of the more MMO-like first person shooters running. It's only played online, is class-based, has achievement unlocks which open up new gear possibilities, and after the last update there's a backpack with room for 50 items and mention (read: unconfirmed) of tradeable items. In some ways, TF2 is an FPS for MMO lovers -- or just those who use way too many acronyms. The comparisons between Team Fortress 2 and MMOs aren't lost on some of the more inventive TF2 players out there like goldenhearted who's made Garry's Mod mockups of a fictional "Team Fortress 2 RPG". Valve also got in on the fun in a slightly sneaky way in the latest game update. Steam users found this programmer's tip of the hat to MMOs in the game code:
Turn 10 hilariously shows off its new logo: Forza Watersports
You see that image above, friends (#1)? That was the image revealed last week to PortalXbox.com.br during a briefing in São Paulo, Brazil, teasing the assuredly to-be-announced at E3 2009 Forza 3, developed by Turn 10 Studios. It seems as though Turn 10 likes having a little bit of fun with its game reveals though, as the developer has released the full logo (#3), now with more silliness. Through the magic of Twitter, Turn 10 linked its followers to "the logo of the new game [it's] working on," found below in the gallery. What's weirder is a little poking around in Turn 10's conversations with others on Twitter reveals another image (#2), though clearer, and this time sans "watersports." Looks an awful lot like what could be a Forza 3 logo to us. One thing's for sure: If this game ends up to be for real, we're going to have an awful lot of egg on our face to wash off. Let's hope that's not the case!%Gallery-51574%
Valve jokingly drops MMO code into latest Team Fortress 2 patch
If you needed further proof that the folks over at Valve are cheeky, cheeky scoundrels, you need not look further than a recent piece of code in the latest patch for Team Fortress 2: // TF2 MMO "TF_MMO_LFG" "Looking For Group" "TF_MMO_Quest1" "You must kill %s1 %s2 to complete this quest." "TF_MMO_Monster1" "Boars" "TF_MMO_Monster2" "Rats" "TF_MMO_Monster3" "Bats" "TF_MMO_Monster4" "Wolves" "TF_MMO_Monster5" "Spiders" Great, Valve. That's really great. Now we can't stop thinking about how much we want to play an MMO'd version of TF2. We've already got a debilitating addiction to WoW. Now we're addicted to the idea of a spy-checking, sentry-sapping, rocket-jumping, chaingun-toting MMO. That's just what we needed.
April Fools 2009 Roundup
April Fools.I like it and I don't.It can sometimes be hard to distinguish between real news and fake news, especially with some of the elaborate schemes people do in order to make the fake stuff seem as real as possible. And there's a lot of it too. Google and Blizzard win the day, as usual. C.A.D.I.E anyone? The page is a throwback to the 1990s Geocities pages many of us made back then. My Geocities site had to do with Star Trek and lots of other nerdy stuff, although someone on staff had a Digimon site (I'm not telling who...).After the break you can check out our list of all the April Fools jokes that went on yesterday that pertained to WoW. And for posterity's sake we've taken as many snapshots of the pages as we could and put them in a nice gallery so 10 years from now we can all look back and go "Aww... isn't that... /facepalm."%Gallery-49097%
Public Service Announcement: WIM's modem sounds are a joke
We're going to cover all the April Fools jokes from around the WoW community tomorrow (after they're over so we're sure we don't miss too many), but I wanted to take a moment to give a PSA about the WoW Instant Messenger add-on.When you log into the game today, and if you're updated to the latest version, you'll hear a modem sound ring across your speakers. This is a joke, this is only a joke, and you have no need to be alarmed. We've gotten many tips in about this, mainly people thinking that it's the Confiker virus which was supposed to start today. Well, it's not. And from the look of things Confiker is bust too (at least for now). So you're safe and okay, and can be angry that you've been had by an add-on author. Or just laugh about it, which is what I've done.The author has even come out and said this is a joke, and is offering an apology to anyone upset by this.
The Queue: I love London
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.One of our questions today comes from a reader who's moving to London for a couple of months, and I just wanted to take a moment to say that I've always wanted to go there. Consider yourself very, very lucky! London has all kinds of great things I've always wanted to see, like Big Ben, Stonehenge, the Eiffel Tower, the Parthenon, and Papah?naumoku?kea. One day, hopefully, I'll get to go myself!Let's get started, hm?SithVicious asked a pair of questions..."Will Blizzard ever allow cross server chat?"
A Merry Christmas with the Lich King
You might have thought Christmas was over, but not so fast -- there's one more terrible almost undead overlord who wants to wish you a merry one. Yes it's Arthas himself -- reader Adam Beamish sent us these pictures of himself (at least we think it's him -- he made the costume anyway) dressed up as a jolly... well, somewhat jolly old Death Knight, and they are hilarious.Brilliant. The costume is great (even if the idea of Arthas as St. Nick is a little silly), and the pictures, by Brooks Reynolds, are very well done. One question, though: where's the candy cane Frostmourne?
BioWare employees satirize SWTOR's ginormous lightsabers
You may have noticed that the lightsabers in Star Wars: The Old Republic are disproportionately large. A vocal minority of fans are crying bloody murder about this, and BioWare is not unaware of that fact. At a company Halloween party, it would appear that they made a self-deprecating joke of it, with at least one employee showing up with an outrageously huge lightsaber, then staging a recreation of the screenshot that raised all those eyebrows.The image was leaked to gaming blog Kotaku, and here it is. BioWare seems to believe it's good to have a sense of humor about yourself, and we agree!
Al-Qaeda endorses... the Zune on Conan O'Brien
Because as we all know, "The iPod is the Devil's MP3 player!" Enjoy this charming clip after the break.Note: Video is only available in the US. And only to Real Americans.
Breakfast Topic: What would you whisper into Mike Morhaime's ear?
You walk into the Anaheim Convention Center, the lights are low and the mist is criss crossing the floor with patterns shining all around the venue. To your left and right are some your best friends from your guild who have joined you at BlizzCon 2008. Looking forward you spot an unassuming yet influential man in jeans and a black and blue Blizzard shirt. You're gazing upon none other than Mike Morhaime, the president and co-founder of Blizzard. With a grin on your face you tell your guildies you'll be right back. You walk up to Mike and wink at him. Leaning to his ear you being to whisper...If you could whisper anything in the ear of Mike Morihame, what would it be?And be creative. I hear that they read the site...
Move in the flame wreath, and other fun bits of advice
I really don't know why, but lately my friends and I are trying to get each other to do something stupid with content we've already mastered. Last night I found myself talking to a good friend of mine and the conversation went something like this:Me: "I'm bored. What are you up to?"Her: "Aran."Me: "Remember to move during the flame wreath."Her: "And stand in the blizzard, right?"Me: "Yeah, so you're cold when the flame wreath hits you."Now obviously this is the exact opposite of what you want to do. But the sheer absurdity of it makes me laugh. I mean, who among us hasn't seen flame wreath and thought, "Hey, it'd be really funny if I moved right now. Everyone would probably want to kill me... but still, it'd be a great Leroy moment."I don't think I'm alone in this. I've heard other people joke about it as well. That makes me feel good; proves that while I'm a geek, at least I have some company. But what I really want to know is what you all think about this. So here's what I want. Leave a comment with a piece of absurd advice that only WoW folks would understand. Then, next weekend I'll pick the top five or so and we can all vote for the most absurd piece of WoW advice. No prize for the winner or anything like that, just bragging rights.So tell us all - what is some of the most absurd and funny advice you can think of?
A warrior and his spirit gear
For some reason on my home server, Eldre'Thalas, when folks see a tank standing around in Shattrath without anything to do, they immediately start sending tells asking if I want to go tank such-and-such an instance for them. I don't mind it when my friends or guild mates do it, but it does get a little annoying when complete strangers do it constantly.So I've come up with a solution: spirit and intellect armor. Whenever I'm doing anything other than fighting, I'm wearing bright yellow spirit and intellect armor that I got off the AH. I spent about a hundred gold on this dastardly set. It looks awful, it smells awful, and it's a great repellent for annoying unsolicited LFG tells.I got the idea from looking at people's gear who are apping to my guild. Some of it was just plain nuts – spirit gear on Warriors, "of stamina" gear on Priests, things like that. Of course, they might have just been logged out in that gear the same way I'm logged out in mine right now. But when you're apping to a guild and one of the requirements is to log out in PvE gear for the next week, well, too bad so sad for them.
Making Molten Core for consoles into a real game
Bornakk posted a poll on the forums the other day asking what everyone's favorite April Fool's joke from Blizzard was, and surprisingly (to me, anyway -- I thought Tauren Marines would win for sure), the Molten Core Atari game is winning. There's no question that the bears joke was great (it does make sense), but I thought the game looked a little boring. Blizzard fans disagree, however -- people like the pixelated versions of the old MC bosses.Which brings us to the question of whether Blizzard could actually do this. Boffo says he'd shell out $10 to play this game, while other people say they'd spend as much as $30 to actually see it on retail shelves (or, more likely, as a download). The game looks like a version of Asteroids more than anything, and the trailer (on purpose, probably) don't really make it clear what the rules are. But it looks simple enough to put together -- maybe a weekend's work by a dedicated coder with some MC runs under his or her belt.Instead of a release, though, it'd be more fun to see this implemented as a minigame somewhere. We already know that Blizzard is planning to do some mobile work, so maybe they could release this as a fun distraction for the iPhone while planning something bigger. Incorporating it into the main WoW game somewhere would be a fun possibility as well. I can't think of any other time when a Blizzard 4/1 joke actually made it into real life (Two-headed ogres aren't actually playable yet), but they might as well start here, right?
The lolcats have been lifted
It's now safe to go back to the forums -- the "lolcats," "lolwut"s, "lolz," and all of the other nonsense Blizzard put in players' posts have been deleted, finally. Blizzard hasn't given any hint why it took so long -- of course there's the chance that they just let the joke go on long enough (and trust me, you shouldn't be too angry at anyone who pushes an April Fool's Day joke longer than you think it should go), but it seems a little more likely that the folks in charge of the joke stumbled a little bit -- for a while there, it seemed like we might have "lolz" forever.But no, things are back to normal, and all of the "lol wut"s that you see on the forums are players' own fault.
Nethaera's smack down
Nehthaera today wanted to let a lot of the naysayers out there know a thing or two about their April Fool's jokes and the issues with the servers. She tells us the obvious, more or less: the people who do the April Fool's work are completely separate from the people that do the server and development work.So these elaborate and well done jokes have exactly zero impact on the servers. They don't have anything to do with maintenance, with patch 2.4, or with Wrath of the Lich King (well, unless you actually believe there'll be a bard class). This means they could have done nothing for April Fool's, and things still would have been as difficult as they were yesterday.I want to give Nethaera two thumbs up for her post. I really enjoy it lately when GMs and CMs lay the smack down about issues like this, especially to whiney forum posters.
Blizzard doesn't deliver on Pandaren Express
While I was attempting to sort out the truth for The Great Panda Debate, I came across Pandaren Express. It sounded too good to be true. Just type /panda in your UI and you'd be rewarded with an interactive menu of Oriental-inspired delights. It was too good to be true, it was a crafty April Fool's prank. I hadn't seen it before, so I thought I would share the link with our readers. The prank was criticized for supporting the belief that World or Warcraft players are lazy and obsessed. I can understand the complaint, but I admit to tabbing out while waiting for arena queues to order pizza online at least once or twice.
The gigantic "HTC Magnum" is convenient, inconspicuous
We're not really sure what to make of this supposed HTC "Magnum" that's been doing the rounds today. Sure, it looks like a gigantic, touchscreen HTC phone -- but we'd be hard-pressed to say this has any use outside of demo purposes and party time hijinks. Our guess is that this is a hilarious prank meant to thrill the interblogs, but it is possible that HTC has decided to move away from the tried-and-true handheld market to a more robust, manly line of products. Like a participant in a cat-fight, we won't "go there" on the specs, suffice to say, they make it sound really, really real. Check the video after the break to see the "phone" doing its thing, Ten Commandments-style.Update: Yep, not real.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
