Today in Tilt-shift teases:

It is with a sense of great shame that I have to admit that I just got taken in by an April Fool's prank. A video game-related April Fool's prank. Specifically this:

Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger are catnip to nerds of a certain age.

Or, if you're younger than I, I don't
know, Taylor Swift? Is she still cool?

You clearly live a rich, full life with many outdoors activities, so I'll explain. Davidvinc RPGs is a channel devoted to role playing video games, usually of the classic Japanese variety. Today's video was entitled Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger in HD2D?! So I clicked. To an outsider, that title is inscrutable, but know that it leads one to believe that there'd been an announcement of HD2D remakes of two super-popular JRPG's of the 1990's. They're to the xennial micro generation what The Eagles are to Boomers.

I kind of had the sense that--huh? Right, HD2D is this recent aesthetic trend in gaming that combines pixel art with a faux tilt-shift effect, so everything looks like an animated diorama. As a style it's slightly twee, but those of us who sip from the chalice of nostalgia for video games we playing in middle school love it. Love it. 

"Put it in my veins."

-adults who were indoor kids in the 90's

YouTuber David Vincent: as adept
with kettlebells as he is pleasant lies

Anyway, as I'm watching this video of alleged footage from the aforementioned remakes, I'm waiting for David, the gaming/gym enthusiast to say something about how it's fan-art, or an unofficial mod, or something, but he doesn't. The footage isn't wholly convincing, but as it went on and no disclaimer was forthcoming, I found myself thinking that perhaps it was legit. I wanted it to be so. For a moment, I allowed myself to believe it. And then it dawned on me what day it was. What's more, I should have known better. After all, April Fool's Day pranks and video games have a long history. A history I've witnessed firsthand: in 1992, the now defunct gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly published a trick that supposedly unlocked a secret boss in Street Fighter II. A prank that lives in infamy too this day. 

And it worked. Untold numbers of kids around the country dumped untold dollars worth of quarters into arcade machines in a vain attempt to fight mythical, and in fact apocraphyl, Sheng Long. But not me, I was on to them and clocked this as fake. Yet here I am today, more than three decades older and none the wiser, for I am now the fool. An April's fool at that. The ignominy of it all!

In retrospect, it's a pretty convincing hoax. So much so, that I'm beginning to
question if I was a particularly astute tween, or just one with serious trust issues.