[April Fools] New Berserk game on the PSP
- Thread starter KalieMa
- Start date
DirectDK said:
If only it were that simple.
Don't feel so bad though, someone actually reposted it on 2ch.net (biggest Japanese forum in existence, for those not in the know) and even they were massively fooled. Please note that I only involved SK.net in the joke myself, so my responsability is not engaged.
グリフィス said:Cheers Aaz, even the red herring April fools gag was entertaining, a brilliant plan indeed.
Hehe thanks man. I know I had a lot of fun doing this, so I hope everyone enjoyed it as well. Plus, let's think positively: maybe this will convince someone that there's demand for a new Berserk game!
Eluvei said:
I was a little apprehensive that this might happen actually. But hey, the PSP's a good system afterall. It's not wasted money.
Thank you, Aazealh......... 
Very well played.
Dar_Klink
Last Guardian when? - CyberKlink 20XX before dying
Hmm, can you tell us the "story" behind it all? So Aaz or Griffith created the magazine screenshot, and then you guys spread it to 2ch hoping it would get reposted here?Walter said:
PS: Accurate depiction of what happened.(Aaz on the far left)
Hats off to the april fools good, you got me! But my psp seems to have lost a little value to me also after this. 
turkitage
ターク
wow... when i posted right after you... i thought you said april fools because it was just a blown up image, not higher quality..
until i read the post today..... man.. i was had.....
you used the obvious april fools SK premium account as a decoy!!! and got a non admin to post this - to make it even LESS obvious. While at the same time you admins were critiquing it for maybe being a fake. genius.
why did i fall for this?
P.S. - AND i wasted my good avatar for the decoy!!
until i read the post today..... man.. i was had.....
you used the obvious april fools SK premium account as a decoy!!! and got a non admin to post this - to make it even LESS obvious. While at the same time you admins were critiquing it for maybe being a fake. genius.
why did i fall for this?
P.S. - AND i wasted my good avatar for the decoy!!
Dar Klink said:
About two months ago I told Walter that April was approaching and we needed to find something to prank people with. After shooting some ideas back and forth for a few minutes I came up with the idea of a PSP game announcement. Was lowkey enough that it wouldn't look too outlandish but would still get people excited.
So I made a template the next day to see what it would look like and well, it looked pretty good. Worked better than I had thought. I used a scan from an old Famitsu magazine as the basis and worked from there. At the same time I devised a plan to make it appear as accidental and non-SK.net centric as possible while keeping it exclusively on SK.net (though I knew that people were likely to repost it elsewhere, but that's not something I can prevent).
That included tricking Kalie Ma into posting the original picture (she wasn't in on it) and tricking her into thinking it came from somewhere other than my HDD, posting a different picture on a Japanese blog I had created from scratch and filled with fake entries, posting it as Vaxillus (who hasn't been around for a year) and then acting normally. There were other steps but those are the most important ones. So just to be clear I'll repeat again that we never spread the pictures anywhere. And to those who did repost them elsewhere: your fault.
As for the images themselves, I knew that a simple clean-looking scan would look to everyone like it came fresh out of Adobe Photoshop®, so I decided to print the page, glue it in an actual magazine and then take shitty pictures of it. Having two different pictures of the same article would lend it credibility, showing it wasn't just a quick edit, and posting low-quality pictures would help hide any defaults in the original image. The Japanese text was mostly taken from old Famitsu articles about past Berserk games; I kept it simple and generic so that it could fit pretty much any Berserk game ever. The four screenshots are what I started working on first though, and they were also the weaker part of the joke. I knew anyone who searched a bit could find them, but at the same time I liked the idea of making it unsure whether it was a simple port of the previous games or a new title.
I made the QTE one using some stock picture from the PS2 game, changing the background and adding the PRESS X caption. Simple enough. The third one is a picture from the PS2 game. I also changed the background, removed some trolls, changed the blood effects so they'd match a system with less power and added a new GUI that was reminiscent of the one in the PS2 game yet clearly different (something slan69 didn't pick up on and that I had to clarify myself), added Puck on the screen, and made it into the "blood rage" mode. As for pictures 2 and 4, they're from the DreamCast game. I modified them a lot less because they were originally really small and I couldn't really work on them properly. The more important changes were making the pictures 16/9 (I made all four of them the perfect size for a PSP screen, to the pixel) and adding in the new GUI. I thought they were relatively uncommon screenshots but hadn't checked that one of them was on the back of the US edition of the DC game. A minor setback, but I made slan69's picture into a (broken) link to give it less visibility just to be sure anyway.
Well that's about it. I was a bit worried about it before we launched the prank (to his credit, Walter was always very confident) but it was a big success and a lot of fun. Thanks again to all of you who posted congratulations. Now of course the big question you guys should be asking yourselves is whether or not I've just been pulling your chain for the past couple of posts and the new game is actually really coming out.
Turkitage said:
Yeah.
