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Perfect Ten: My favorite MMO April Fools' pranks of all time
There are two types of people on April 1st: those who are annoyed and indifferent to the tomfoolery going on all around them, and those who gleefully embrace the zany antics and baldfaced lies. For the record, I am of the latter crowd. I love April Fools' Day and the humor and creativity that it inspires. While this day is by no means contained to our neck of the woods, MMOs have a long-running streak of trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I think a good goof has to have several qualities to make it truly memorable. It needs to be original. It needs to be actually amusing, whether or not you "fell for it." And it needs to tweak our expectations and understanding of how MMOs work. Sometimes there are even important ideas that emerge from these jokes that could, indeed, make these titles better. So let's go through my favorite MMO April Fools pranks of all time, as catalogued by yours truly!
Guild Wars 2 Mac beta available now
Guild Wars 2 was released earlier this month -- it's a very popular sequel to a great (subscription-free) MMO game, and it offers up a lot of interesting innovations in regards to online massively multiplayer RPGs. When the game arrived, it was a PC-only title, but the developers have now announced that they will be supporting the game on Mac as well. As ArenaNet says, the company is happy to "offer [Macs] as part of our employee laptop subsidy program, and our president Mike O'Brien is rarely seen without his Mac laptop. We're as excited as anyone to play Guild Wars 2 on OS X." The Mac beta is available right now. Of course, you'll need to purchase the game itself, but once you do, you can download and install the Mac beta client, and play the game while it's being tested. Pay attention to the system requirements -- they recommend some fairly recent Macs (and 4 GB of RAM), so if you're running anything older, you might have some issues. But Guild Wars 2 is a great game, and now it's even greater that we can run it natively right on the Mac. Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
