2017 in silly back page jokes

It's all over...

Every month, after filling PC Gamer with almost 132 pages of quality reviews, previews, features and retrospectives, we arrive at the final page. The joke page. Inevitably it doesn't come together until the last day of production—sometimes the day after we're supposed to go to press. Nevertheless, it always gets done, and sometimes it's done well. Last year, we had a pretty good rate of hits (alongside some baffling misses). This year, not so much, although these are probably still better than 2015's bunch. We'll let you decide if that's actually the case. Here's 2017 in silly back page jokes.

February 2017: Mass Effect Andromeda

Phil: Normally when we do a bad All Over, my response is to go, "Oh well, we fucked that up," and move on with my life. Sometimes you overlay five Tub Geralts on a Mirror's Edge screenshot and it's bad. But this one still annoys me, because it was really funny in the Google Doc. Here, the order of the emotions is wrong, and it's stupid that you have to refer to a key to understand what the joke is. Basically, nothing about this works.

Samuel: You just have to work too hard to get this one. And it looks more like fucking electronic spin the bottle than a BioWare dialogue wheel. That said, I came up with 'I blame the Hanar' and I maintain that's funny in a 7/10 kind of way.

Pip: That middle wheel thing looks like it comes from a Quirky Family Fun board game. Or maybe a pub quiz machine.

Phil: We could have probably fixed it if we had time, but as always, it basically happened the day after deadline.

Samuel: Yeah, it didn't look right, but magazines have to go to press by a certain time or otherwise bad things happen. Also I remember being sad when I edited this one.

March 2017: Elite Dangerous

Samuel: The Elite community loved this one, and it taps into a subject I know is close to Andy's heart: people being twats on the internet and spoiling nice things, which is a common thing in multiplayer games, of course, but not so much in Elite. That's why this is funny.

Andy: I enjoyed writing this one. Elite players are actually a lot more courteous and well-behaved than in some online games, but you still get the odd rude boy, and I like to imagine they’ll be the ones that make first contact with the Thargoids. I have a 320,000 word backstory for Ambassador Gruughthaax Morgblorb worked out that didn’t make the final cut, so I’ll be self-publishing that as an ebook in the new year.