2017 in silly back page jokes

April 2017: For Honor

Phil: I spent ages trying to get our art editor to put pirates before Jedi on the timeline, because that is obviously how the joke should progress. He never did, though, and so this page remains inherently wrong.

Samuel: My main contribution to this was 'your dad with a hedge trimmer', which I believe is fantastic, and I might actually have come up with the overall idea for this one. It's alright.

Andy: My only criticism of this one is that it’s ‘your dad’ rather than ‘yer da’, but that would probably only appeal to Glaswegians, to be fair. Joe and I would appreciate it.

Samuel: Yeah, and I think me writing that would therefore be a form of cultural appropriation. I don't want you and Scottish games Twitter coming after me, Andy.

May 2017: Ghost Recon Wildlands

Samuel: This was a parody of the game's portrayal of Bolivia, as opposed to our opinion of Bolivia. Did that come across? I hope so. I know nothing about Bolivia. I hope it's good. 

Phil: I'd played Wildlands for a good 40 hours for this issue's review, and I think I was annoyed by its tone. And then I tried to mask that obvious annoyance by changing all the drug references to something stupid. "Charlie Chaplin's exquisite nose powder" still makes me laugh.

June 2017: Hero Shooters (Various)

Samuel: The idea of this one isn't bad, but you have to assemble the joke yourself, which isn't ideal. I mainly wanted to take a stab at the random nonsense you see in every hero shooter: a dad with a hammer who's a tree, etc. That sort of colourful design strikes me as pretty cynical and it's put me off all of those games, to be honest. 

Phil: This is one of my favourites of the year for lots of little reasons, like the delineation between "robot (functional)" and "robot (dog)". Let's be honest, these pages are never hilarious, but I'll happily settle for 'vague mirth'.

Andy: If the reader softly exhales from the nose while reading, that’s enough. We don’t even need a smile. Just that vague snort indicating, yes, I was lightly amused by this.

Pip: Is this a good time to point out that actually it doesn’t physically work in the way the intro describes. You couldn’t put a split pin through it because if you cut it out you’d just have a bunch of concentric rings rather than layered circles which… I’ll get my coat.

Samuel: Leave it, Pip, you've not passed your three months' probation on PC Gamer yet. 

Phil: It's hard to identify and fix conceptual flaws when the issue was supposed to be with the printers two hours ago.