April Fool\'s Day makes it difficult to take any news seriously.

Ever since internet magazines made it possible to target specific days of the month (monthly print magazines can eat their heart out), the first of April has been the game industry\'s least trustable day.

It\'s a phenomenon that\'s fairly unique to the tech industries. You won\'t find CNN posting fake news items, but you\'d be silly to trust any sensational news gleaned from the web during the 1st of the month if computers are involved.

It can be interesting to guess at which news items are real, and which are fakes. You\'d be surprised at the number of e-mails we received last year regarding a news report that Apple was releasing a portable game player designed to compete with the PSP and Nintendo DS. At the time, at least, there was no such thing. It wasn\'t ours, but it was our personal favorite from last year\'s pick of practical jokes.

This year, though, our top pick (aside from our own little gag, which we\'ve removed from the running) has to go to Arstechnica.com for their coverage of Duke Nukem Forever. Whether they are pulling our leg or not, pretty much the name Duke Nukem and the word \"Review\" appearing in a headline is enough to make it onto any practical joke list. (Hopefully that won\'t always be the case; Duke Nukem is a franchise we\'re all secretly cheering for.)

• Arstechnica.com: Duke Nukem Forever Review
  
  It\'s difficult to tell whether or not this story is for real, but Ben Kuchera\'s tale of finding a copy of the Duke Nukem Forever demo on a four disk promotional DVD and being able to unlock 12 levels of the game is difficult to believe. Given the day, our first instinct is to nod our heads and smile, and then wait to see if the truth is later revealed. Apparently Duke Nukem has now made a transition to Web 3.0, and has been built using Ruby on Rails. When played on Apple\'s Safari web browser, some of the textures took on a highly recognizable brushed steel appearance. Hmmm... interesting. The biggest kicker has to be the comment about Duke Nukem taking place in the future... 2004. Truth or excellent underhanded wisecrack? Who knows, but it\'s got our bet for this year\'s April Fool\'s gold medal so far.
  
  
  
• GameFAQ.com\'s Anti-Cheat Association of America:
  
  GameFAQ makes the list with a move that\'s not even questionable as a practical joke. Visiting GameFAQ.com on April 1st shows you a notification that the site has been taken down by the courts, supposedly at the hands of the ACAA. The ACAA regulates the use of cheat codes, eliminating a not-so victimless crime, apparently. GameFAQ, of course, is one of the world\'s top offenders in terms of facilitating the common use of cheat codes. Shame on them. Scrolling down to the end of the page gives you a link to the actual FAQ site, as does waiting 60 seconds for the page to redirect you automatically. Even with the pretty obvious link, though, we\'d be willing to bet that their through-traffic is remarkable low compared to their average; web users are remarkably fickle in their time when it comes to searching for links. Thumbs up to a site that\'s willing to take a hit in their traffic for a day in exchange for giving everyone a little laugh. If you don\'t get a chance to see the prank yourself, Joystiq.com has a picture of what you\'d see.
  
  
  
• Wizard.com\'s My Little Pony Role-playing Game:
  
  It\'s hard to say where this one came from, and there\'s always a chance that it\'s real. The idea of a My Little Pony Role-playing game is so outside the traditional RPG demographic that we can\'t help but think its appearance today indicates a little insincerity on the part of the developers. You can take a look at the \"press release\" here in Wizard.com\'s website. Real? It\'s hard to say; any of these stories could be real, but we won\'t know for sure until tomorrow when all the websites pull back the curtain and shout, \"Ah ha! Got you!\"
  
  
  
• World of Warcraft\'s Wisp Race:
  
  They\'re small. They\'re special power is that they blow themselves up. They can also swell into trees, which drops their dodge ability by 50%. This makes them the most flexible trees ever, since I\'d think being a tree would make your dodge ability drop to 0%. Introducing the Wisps, a race that Blizzard will be bringing into World of Warcraft in their latest expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. Someone put a lot of work into making this page look legit, but with such excellent abilities as turning into a tree and committing suicide (with permanent death, by the way), we can\'t help but laugh or shake our heads in wonder. April Fools? We\'re saying yes. Thumbs up for this one as well.