April Fool’s Day is rubbish once you’re past the age of about eight, but the games industry seems to have bucked this trend a fair amount. Look at Volition with their Ostrich Hammer, for example.

What originally started as some dedicated gamers (read: twitpots on NeoGAF) slagging off Red Faction: Guerrilla eons ago became a brilliant send-up of said pots of twit, then went on to become an actual in-game item. Brilliant.

It’s a sign that it isn’t just the BBC and hecklerspray that pull out incredible April Fool’s’’s’.

Following in the footsteps of Volition – or maybe just walking step-by-step with them, seeing as it was announced at just about the same time – comes Twisted Pixel’s ‘Splosion Man.

Another April Fool’s Day announcement, another thing that actually exists In Real Life. The madness!

What it shows is that games companies are capable of moving things that bit further, thus keeping the whole day of the fool that bit more interesting than in other realms. Unlike, for example, The Guardian and their announcement they would be moving to Twitter-only distribution (more reasonably clever than actually funny).

Of course there are rubbish claims, just as anywhere else, but the effort put in by the developers we tend to worship can verge on the good – ala Blizzard and the Terran Terra-Tron of Starcraft II – through the almost believable, like the Craigslist posting for a paid position as a World of Warcraft Guild Director – and on to the rather spiffy, like Konami’s piss-about with Metal Gear Solid 4.

Which was rather like the excellent, excellent Assassin’s Solid last year, which made many people wet with delight. The fools.

It’s almost enough to make you forget the fact that the world is falling apart around us, that we’re all losing our jobs and that we will soon have to begin feasting on the entrails of our nearest and dearest as we’re pushed closer to the apocalypse with each passing day.

Plus it’s nice that some companies actually make a bit of an effort to make us laugh, as opposed to just going “YOUR MUM’S DEAD AHAHA” and expecting the entire world to crack up.

No, we’re not bitter about what the gamers get on April Fool’s Day. Not even after Computer and Video Games magazine duped us with false claims about unlocking the Ultimate characters on the SNES version of Mortal Kombat 3 and we spent hours – HOURS – trying to do it. Oh no.

Not us.

We couldn’t possibly be – not in a world where an OSTRICH HAMMER exists, thus making Red Faction Guerrilla look more than just lovely. It looks eggceptional.

You know? Like an egg? That an ostrich might lay? A pun? Yes? No?

Sorry.

THIS WEEK: Living in a bizarre fantasy world, we bizarrely thought – in a fantasy fashion – that Crysis might actually be playable on this here laptop. It isn’t. We also managed to get genuinely excited for the first time in approximately 13 years at the news of a new Syndicate game, handled by Chronicles of Riddick developers Starbreeze. Delicious.

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