Even reputed game journalists are not above gullibility. GameVideos.com Director Mark MacDonald sent us word of a prank he played in the 1UP / EGM offices recently where he used pre-recorded footage of Metroid Prime 2 and Auto Modelista, a "replica Wii joystiq [sic]," and a laptop battery posing as a sensor bar to fool more than a few editors that they had gotten a retail Wii unit in early.
Dan Hsu caught on quickly, after launching into a mini-tirade about unreturned e-mails to Nintendo. A few others, however, were no so lucky, even sitting down to play the games for many minutes before realizing they were mere marionettes in a sick and twisted mind game. All the embarrassment has been caught on tape, uploaded, and embedded below.
That was pretty funny near the end. I think the prank worked better with a racing game as there isn't too much you can deviate by. I mean you see the turn...and you turn. It looks like you did it youself However it's easy to get suspicious if you are shooting and turning in totally opposite directions in Metroid Prime.
I like that the guy sat down to play metroid and figured out that he wasn't playing. He just let them have their jokes, and then was like, "I like the fact that ... this is running off of a tape cassette."
That said, gamevideos.com rarely – if ever– works on my computer. I always just assumed its because I use a Mac and gamevids is doing something that they didn't bother testing on Safari. Like BestBuy.com's menus. Or lots of other sites.
I like Flash videos, save for the ones from Gamevideos.com. The video plays fine, but there's never any audio. I've tried it on three different computers, different browsers, different versions of Flash... never works. Everything else plays fine though.
Yeah just keep in mind the guys who didn't figure it out are the ones that are reviewing and writing about videogames for a living. I have so much hope for the industry! :)
@ matthew: I'm on a Mac too, and I dont have problems with any of the websites you mentioned... odd. anyways, I find Mark Macdonald to be suprisingly toned down here. He's usually a douche.
refering to comment 14, at first I thought u were right, but i think that they just edited it out of order and the guy in the white shirt was in on it at that point, but they put it at the beginning
It's not flash video in general, it's gamevideo's flash videos. They SUCK! Please fix your dumb player gamevideos.com. Send them hate e-mail until they fix it.
It was weird I clicked play to see the video and it just froze, then I moved my mouse and it played, I stoped moving my mouse and it stoped playing, I did this several times thinking WTF? to watch the whole video i kept moving my mouse.
I feel sorry for those guy's I know they feel like asses.
How did you post during the day? I thought trolls turned to stone if they got exposed to light, and I have yet to find a cave with any kind of internet connectivity.
Mark MacDonald sure pulled a great one on the rest of the EGM and 1up gang. This tops my April Fool's prank that I did on 1up earlier this year. True, mine was almost obviously fake, but it still tricked some people. Zelda: Twilight Princess plus a Wii Remote and I rode that joke a good distance. Paul Gale 1up.com
ah my mistake, got the numbers mixed up, but seriously I was just telling the kid, why he thinks PS3 won by just selling 100k units for Japan, 400k for USA. When Wii has more units to sell, IMO.
Oh my gosh, hoo-haa, you're so right! I seriously just got PWNZed by a PS3 just three minutes ago! It, like, shot through the roof and did that... PWNZing thing or whatever, and I got totally PWNZed!
Forgive me for finding joy in an unworthy game system! I am unclean!
ive never had any problems with any sort of flash video player, including Youtube, Dailymotion, Gamevideos, Google Video, etc. so i don't really know what you're all talking about
gamevideos has never worked right for me. You'd think that a site dedicated to technology would be able to get their frickin' flash videos to work. Oh well. At least they don't crash my browser anymore...
lol, but joke aside, a bunch of game sites already got a retail Wii, 1up hasn`t? strange. I bet Gamespot and IGN are already working on the Zelda/Exite Truck reviews by now.
I have NEVER ONCE been able to load gamevideos. It may have something to do with my ISP, or maybe they just suck, I can't even access their website. YouTube I don't mind as much, or gametrailers, or pretty much ANY OTHER video hosting site. It's not just that I can't play the video, even the player, or anything else from them doesn't load. It would be really nice to see more youtube hosted videos, and less gamevideos.
Does this remind anyone else of watching games in the arcade on demo mode, waiting for coins? I'd walk up and start mashing buttons, pretending to play because I didn't have any quarters. I would convince myself that somehow my button mashing was actually influencing what was happening on screen? Our brains like to connect unrelated actions together more than it likes to reassure us that they're unconnected. Good times. Good fakeout.
Wow, that was a great video. The guy doing the racing game really did believe he was playing. I can't believe they pulled that off... especially the metroid part since you'll need the nunchuck for metroid and they didn't use one. That shows how uneducated some people are about these games.
For those on a Mac like me, the video doesn't work on Safari, but does on Camino and in Firefox the audio works but no video to start with, but if you grab the slider and move it the video will appear.
PS: for some reason adding a comment on this site doesn't work in Camino, so this site needs to get coded better and 1UP needs to use a different video player.
