Tue Apr 01, 2003 7:48 pm by Kaleban
I have a feeling that those who thought it was funny either have no idea what the definition of "fool" is, or "humour" for that matter, but that they also may pander to the webmasters here.
A joke includes a punchline. The words, "April Fool's" is not considered a punchline in the classical sense, therefore cannot be the ending of a joke.
Having fun at other people's expense is always a bad idea. April Fool's jokes can be done in a positive way though, and as others have suggested, the inclusion of blatant and outrageous items with the mundane and/or hoped for would have made it better. DiabloII.Net usually does a good job of April Fool's, as the webmasters there have both a great sense of humour (if a bit dry at times) and are actually good columnists.
I'm not angry at those who did the joke. I figured it was also an April Fool's joke, and was in fact surfing the web and my favorite sites to see what people came up with. However, this site did a lousy job, since those who wrote the "joke" made no indication of its falsehood that would have been obvious to the casual observer. The inclusion of something to make a person hesitate as to a joke's believability (i.e. gullibility), is mysteriously absent. I believe the authors may have had it right when they cited April as the release date, and whoever changed it to a believable Christmas date did exactly the wrong thing.
In fact, the date would have been the clincher in the joke, and anyone who believed it after that would have been a fool.
I've seen many games release expansions 6-12 months after their initial game, and M$ is famous in game publishing for stripping content from a gold game to make a thirty dollar expansion 6 months down the line.
I would say that whomever changed the release date is the one who killed any trace of humour in the announcement.