7 Times a Game Was So Meta It Freaked You Out: The Return

on several occasions we've made videos about those spooky moments when games became weirdly self-aware freaking you out by getting all meta we thought that would be an end to it but if that's the case why am i still getting freaked out on the regular by games not afraid to subtly masterfully poke holes in the fourth wall in ways we never saw coming moments where against all odds the game seems to suddenly become eerily aware of the presence of you the player weird like how youtube knows you're watching this on a boat bethany god i hope that worked on someone anyway we're spoilers for the following games bethany [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you don't expect an existential crisis with a game as lovely as animal crossing new horizons i mean unless you go to the bit in the menus where it tells you how many hours you've played oh no my time on earth and really this isn't the kind of game where you expect freaky fourth wall breaks either seeing as new horizons is relentlessly devoted to creating a cozy atmosphere of good island vibes somewhere you can live work and decorate at a gentle pace alongside a cute cast of animal pals [Music] but the watertight fiction of new horizons can indeed spring a leak for players lucky enough or perhaps that should be unlucky enough to catch one of their villagers in the middle of a truman show caliber reality crisis like dear sweet coal here [Music] me [Music] wow cole that story really took a left turn at the end there it's not clear who started the rumor among the villagers that they really are little more than bit players in someone else's game but you can hear this dose of existential terror from any villager with the personality type lazy which doesn't narrow it down frankly you see anyone else picking up tree branches around here yeah you're welcome diana feeling light need the juice it's easy to forget that there was a time when call of duty wasn't battle royale plus world war ii campaign plus multiplayer in space or whatever it was a simple warfare simulator with zombies said zombies mode first arrived in 2008's call of duty world at war but really hit its stride in 2010's call of duty black ops or blops if you will this mode if you're not familiar involves defending yourself against hordes of ravening undead by gunning down said zombies unlocking new areas and weapons and indulging in the most unrealistically easy diy i've ever seen on screen zombies mode has a fairly tenuous grasp on reality though after all this is a game in which one level sees you playing as president john f kennedy mowing down scores of the living dead with an smg gentleman lock and load i know what you're thinking with his bad back highly unrealistic it still comes as a surprise though when the game can if you're lucky get weirdly meta in black ops first zombies map called kino der toten you play as one tank dempsey trapped in a movie theater full of nazi zombies not a chance in hell you maggot addicts as you just heard dempsey will occasionally bark commentary on his terrible situation you know like almost every playable game character ever what you probably wouldn't expect however and what would likely make you jump out of your skin if you're fortunate enough to hear it is dempsey addressing you the player directly if you run low on ammo hey player drop the chips and get me some ammo how did he know is it because i'm always eating chips [Music] it's not fair to put things in your game that will weird out the player if that game already features tingle that should be a rule but nobody told nintendo who made a game that not only has a prominent role for tingle but also features one particularly trippy example of a game breaking the fourth wall this instance of the game going meta is pretty subtle to the extent that this isn't so much wind waker breaking the fourth wall as it is wind waker poking a small hole in the fourth wall then having link peer at you through it with his giant cell shaded cartoon eyes plus this blink and you'll miss it moment is even more obscure because it's buried in a part of the game that many players could skip entirely if they're smart visitors to outset ireland have the opportunity to spar with orca the standard rpg old bloke who tutorializes you in swordfighting at the start of the game [Applause] at any point you can go back home and smack the stuffing out of orca just to drive home the point that you the hero of legend to whom the very wind submits are the greatest fighter of the age and that he is a dumb old hermit weirdo also he gives you money if you hit him enough which the more we think about it the more this seems like a mugging orca gives you better rewards the more hits you land before he himself is able to whack you three times this is a significant challenge with the best reward being a piece of heart which you get for landing 500 hits continue beating orca senseless after that point and he'll eventually lose count at a whopping 1 000 hits and stop the fight but not before telling you this and why would your left index finger be numb because all this long time you've been holding down the gamecube or wii u's left trigger button to stay locked onto orca is why which means orca knows you're playing a game spooky though what orca doesn't know apparently is that you can switch targeting to stay locked on with a single press come on orca read the dang menus we were right to beat you senseless [Music] on a previous one of these lists we talked about a bit in the legend of zelda the phantom hourglass where you had to snapshot your nintendo ds to stamp a location onto your map pretty meta [Music] cute well here's a nintendo ds puzzle that makes zelda look like a game for kids i mean it is a game for kids no no it's not if it is then how come i like it so much then step forward another code two memories also known in the us as trace memory an early nintendo ds title that saw you play as a girl called ashley searching for her missing father pointing and indeed clicking your way to the truth on the ominously named blood edward island the game was reasonably well received by critics who praised its story and visuals but weren't satisfied with its relatively short length for an adventure game but that's not a problem you will face if like so many others you spend approximately 10 000 hours stuck on the game's most infamous puzzle said puzzle arrives when ashley conducts a search of one of henry edwards study henry was presumably quite a lonely chap because on his coffee table he has a framed photo that shows no family or friends just a series of weird symbols which is just barely a step up from keeping the stock image of a labrador that came with the frame [Music] these symbols are in fact a clue that points to the location of a vital key but how to solve the puzzle left another code players in 2005 tearing their vote for pedro t-shirts apart in frustration or hurrying to forums to find the solution to a puzzle that is as inscrutable as it is weirdly meta because the answer is found not by exploring henry's office but the console itself you have to tilt the ds screen down a little until its image is reflected in the bottom screen do this and when you strike the right angle you'll see the key superimposed inside the book alongside the code f3 head to the bookcase in the same room and inspect the large book in section f3 and voila the key is yours [Music] you're welcome everyone on game faq 17 years ago look at what your full dog placed in my pack a putrid half-eaten hair is not something a woman wants to find in her unmentionables dirty mongol can have this back there and tell him not to do it again here at outside extra we've never been afraid to speak the truth no matter how controversial or shocking that truth may be and we think dogs are good don't at me and few dogs are better than dog the dog called dog in dog in age origins an rpg about this dog and his gang of human friends who follow him around and occasionally comment negatively on his smell that may be so but all the same i would like your permission to bathe him dog who is the faithful companion to the warden character in dragon age has qualities other than alienating humans with his smell he can also fight like hell and when not occupied tearing out throats can be sent to dig up treasures he's covered in blood and he just dug up some old soiled pants i think maybe we should bathe him back to the digging up of old junk though buried deep within dragon age origins and also deep within the earth in dragon age origins is one treasure likely to blow the mind of you the player a codex entry dog has a random chance of retrieving called a very chewed and moist book the book is a diary that contains a few inscrutable ramblings passing mention of a legendary sword and most unnerving day 42 i begin to suspect that we are being manipulated as if by some unseen hand far above us always i heard the sound of clicking click click click click an extremely self-aware note clearly designed to give anyone playing dragon age origins on pc a shiver up the spine weird we're playing on xbox though so i don't know what click clicking they're referring to oh wait my hand bones after that zelda fight [Music] the x-men franchise is full of things that boggle the mind like the almost limitless power of jean grey or the fact that they cast kelsey grammar to play beasts that one time but even kelsey grammer playing beast which we remind you he did has nothing on the mind-boggling nature of one particular level in the x-men 1993 action platformer for the sega genesis [Music] that level is mojo's future crunch a cyber dystopia ruled by x-men villain mojo who despite being an evil alien who lives inside a cybernetic spider-suit has more in common with us than you might think for instance just like qri he is weak to being punched hard over and over in the bum [Music] mojo is nominally the boss of this level but presents nothing like the challenge that faces players shortly after when they reach the end of the stage and find a floating screen of some kind and nothing else destroying the screen appears to do nothing but make professor x's face appear on the nearby tvs eventually time runs out prompting an on-screen warning reset the computer now but with no computer in sight it's not remotely clear how to progress [Music] well friend you could spend your whole life replaying this level over and over trying to root out the computer that needs resetting but you won't find it because the computer that needs resetting is your actual sega genesis that's right tap the button on the console at this point in the game to perform a soft reset and your screen will fill with matrix style code before a cutscene plays or what used to pass for a cutscene in 1993 and the game resumes extremely meta but ultimately a deceptively simple solution to the puzzle unless of course you hold down the reset button for a fraction of a second too long making the console register a hard reset instead of a soft one deleting your progress and sending you back to the start screen brutal and self-aware nice x-men it makes you wonder what other games would deploy so devious a method of puzzle solving doesn't it oh i'm not googling it i'm looking up deleted kelsey grammar beast scenes and will be for some time seems like they deleted a lot [Music] so [Music] games are complicated so we use helpful jargon to help make sense of them like looter shooter easter egg camping nerf roguelike roguelite and cheese otherwise video games simply wouldn't make sense but what happens when a game itself somehow becomes aware of the terminology that we use to describe and categorize our favorite hobby the game psychonauts is what happens ah top of the martin to you ma'am and good day to you officer a lungfish specifically a boss fight in the game's lungfish opolis stage a level that sees game protagonist raz putin stomping angrily around said metropolis in gigantic form crushing buildings and terrifying the locals like a godzilla in goggles which does anyone else feel the need to draw that no me the defender of this town is kochamara a similarly massive dude intent on stopping you and like any video game boss he has a roster of attacks you need to deal with the only difference being coach amara will sometimes yell out the type of generic boss attack he's about to do attack uh-oh clearly someone told coach amara about aoe or maybe he just plays a lot of world of warcraft maybe some dark souls too seeing as he knows just as well as you do about a boss's most hated technique a combo that never seems to end overly intricate combination cochamara does double duty here as he's both a parody of generic video game boss battles and japanese tokusatsu films and tv shows like ultraman beam or of course godzilla there what his atomic breath weapon was hurting his eyes so those were yet more times that games got weirdly meta isn't that right bethany yeah bethany i know all about the boat trip why are you even going on a boat trip you get seasick all the time and oh my goodness you can't even swim what's the point what that's the worst idea anyway what is a good idea is if you hit that like button see we're self-aware we know what's happening here we see all those videos on the side you shouldn't watch those you'd only watch our videos and you should like those ones unless there are videos as well only watch hours yeah and you should click that like button and you should hit that subscribe or oh and check these videos out over there see we know we know what this is we know

Channel: Outside Xtra

Views: 447,982

Keywords: Ellen Rose, Luke Westaway, Outside Xtra

Id: seW3rHrKlHo

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 01 2022