Playback: Week in Review

Welcome to spring. While blossoming flowers, blues skies, bunnies with chicken voice-overs, and warmer weather all have absolutely nothing to do with gaming, they do usher in the only holiday of the year where gaming news editors can let loose their twisted humor and fabricate completely false news stories. Gaming sites webwide took advantage of the holiday and were posting all sorts of humorous information. Maxis used the holiday to introduce its upcoming title, The Sims, as it vandalized the official SimCity site, and Cavedog Entertainment claimed a name change to Frozen Yak. More on our April Fools' Day coverage a little later.

Spring and good weather shouldn't have an effect on gaming, but they do have an effect on the gaming business - specifically, many employees are coming out of hibernation and going on vacation before the major E3 ramp-up begins. Luckily, there was still some solid news coming out this week with the announcements of several games being released and being developed.

Once head of Trilobyte and now known to gamers as id Software's newest game designer, Graeme Devine updated the status of Quake III Arena by saying that a test version for gamers will be showing up in the next few weeks. So far, gamers haven't seen anything all that stable (yes, we know that many have played the unofficial IHV test version), so when the official test version does release, gamers will download like there's no tomorrow. We have yet to play the title and have only seen demos playing at the recent Game Developers Conference. And like you, we really want to take the latest Quake for a spin.

Maxis also announced its first use of its new technology called the CityCam. Those without SimCity 3000 (with the way it has been dominating retail we don't know who doesn't have a copy yet) can view cities uploaded to the web site through a special Javascript applet. The technology is fun for new players and old to see how others are building their cities. Unfortunately, the latest PC Data numbers say that 989 Studios' massively multiplayer title EverQuest has taken the top-selling spot away from SimCity and pushed it to number two. From what we can tell, EverQuest is taking the world by storm. Also announced this week was Red Storm's first add-on for its popular Rainbow Six title, Force 21, which will be released in late June.

A good portion of our news coverage on April 1 was fake, as you may have noticed. But we did receive some e-mails from suckers who weren't informed about all this. Take for instance our top story regarding Starcraft Adventures being in the works. Blizzard would never do that. And one of our long-time readers remembered that last year we said that the gold disk of Starcraft was lost and the team had to start over. He didn't fall for the joke but appreciated the effort. Our second biggest story, Daikatana Released, brought chuckles to many, and some gamers actually got the inside joke about ION releasing the AI for the game this fall.

Other April Fools' Day stories that went live yesterday included poking fun at a group of managers with no skills building a game, GT dropping game development costs to only US$99.99 (yeah sure, maybe with a box of crayons and paper), and Johnny Wilson's wedding video (he isn't married yet, and the happily engaged editorial director of CGW e-mailed us this morning to praise the false article). Yes, we're brutal, but we're gamers who need to have some fun. The Gathering of Developer's CEO Mike Wilson was in the GameSpot office yesterday, and we wished we had posted something like The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Sign Deal with The Gathering or something like that. If you don't know who the San Francisco-based Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are, look them up in the news, and you'll get the joke (be prepared for a shock though). Then there was Cabela's Feces Hunter. You should see the stories we didn't think we should post....

Games that were released this week, for those who haven't been paying attention, include Eidos' Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty, 3DO's High Heat 2000 and Requiem, Westwood's Lands of Lore III, and Interplay's Pro Pinball: Big Race USA, Apache Havoc, Baseball Edition 2000, and Golf Pro bundle.