7 Surprising Real-World Things Games Made You Do 

Evolving Inkay in the Pokemon games! You have to turn the system upside down and level it up!

I didn't know it was legal to make such a list without mentioning Startropics for the NES. It contained a real life version of the letter that your ingame character received. At some point in the game there is a puzzle for which you need to dunk the actual real letter in water, because the solution was printed on there - but with invisible ink. My tiny child brain almost exploded from the sheer mind-bogglitude of this.

So now, 27 years later as the world teeters on the brink, I finally find out (from people I respect and care for) that the entire reason myself nor any of my friends could beat X-Men was the reset button... I need a drink.

I remember as a kid when Psycho Mantis pulled the "I can read your mind" trick (not knowing that he reads your memory card) I felt rather insulted when he flat out told me that "You're memory is completly clean."

I disagree, forget Psycho Mantis. The most Meta moment in Metal Gear Solid was when they tell you to look on the back of the game case to get a Codec frequency.

Before wireless trading was a thing, you had to go out and make friends in real life in order to complete the pokedex in any Pokemon game.

Boktai: You need sunlight. Me: This is Britain, all I can offer is rain and misery.

I would also like to point out the relatively little-known game "OneShot" in which you control Niko, a young Human/Cat person. Throughout the game you are made to search through your computer's hard drive for other files the game has created, and even sometimes run a completely separate program that you can overlay on the game's window to show you what to do.

LoZ: Phantom Hourglass - the bit where you have to copy the one map to your map by closing the DS. Took everyone a very long time to figure that out, I recall.

Ride To Hell: Retribution a game so bad the only way to win is immediately turn off your console and not play it.

Infamous : Second Son had an interesting optional side quest that required you to do a bunch of internet detective work to then progress in game. I really enjoyed it actually. Not sure if the sites are still live.

Hey, that "Close the DS" thing was a thing in Phantom Hourglass too. In fact, there were a few other examples, like blowing into the mic to remove dust from a map

this reminds me of almost anything you have to do in Doki Doki Literature Club. having to find and/or delete certain game files is both creepy and way too complex :'D

Wheres the Stanley Parable's "Go Outside" achievement, that required you to not play the game for 5 long years?

There’s that one Ace Attorney game where you blow into the DS’s microphone to clear fingerprint dust. Expect, in my case, I was playing using an emulator, and had to yell into my laptop’s baby microphone.

I'd like to throw the original DS version of 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine doors in the ring. Through the entire game, you hold the DS normally, with third person narration of the story and the escape room puzzle segments on the bottom touch screen, and visual novel style dialogue on the top. To make a long story short, it's later revealed that each screen is actually separate but similar events. The top screen is for the present day story, while the bottom screen is for puzzles and third person narration as someone views the future from the past. When that past character has to watch someone in the present do a puzzle, both screens appear upside down forcing you to flip the DS. In doing so the bottom screen remains in the past (showing that past character) and the top screen remains in the present (present day character doing the puzzle). Look, it's wordy af, but it's a cool use of the DS okay?? Nothing mindblowing, but a clever narrative device only made possible with two screens.

Analogue: A Hate Story, where you had to make and eat a cake. Or just wait until a character believes you’ve done it.

So many DS games loved this, yeah. The Phoenix Wright series let you yell "Objection!" in order to move the game forward and you had to do so at the end of the game to see the credits. I finished one in the student union at my college and was rather embarrased to have to shout in front of so many people...

You did miss the complete Monster Rancher series on PS/PS2, where monsters can be generated by inserting any CD/DVD into the game system!

No mention of the requirement to learn Braille to find out how to obtain the Regi Pokémon in R/S/E?

This reminds me of that one Wii Party game called "Hide n Hunt" where you have to hide your real life Wii Remote from another player.

In the Megaman inspired 3ds game Azure Striker Gunvolt 2. The game literally asks you to sing into mic to beat final boss. Not one game to finish in public that's for sure.

I always liked The Secret World's quests that pretty much required a google search unless you already knew morse code, could read sheet music, Greek and Romanian.

Anyone else remember Spectrobes where you had to line physical cards up with the DS touch screen and tap specific dots with the stylus to unlock new things? No, just me? Ok then.

6:05 Boktai is short for Bokura no Taiyou which means "Our Sun".

So... Covering oneself in garlic paste before playing games outside in the sun doesn't keep killer clown kidnappers away? Excuse me, I need to have a serious and long overdue talk with my older brother.

A small moment when you needed to use a real life object was in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box/Pandora's box. Brand new copies of the game would have printed train ticket of the one the professor receives early on in the game, which you'd later need to use in order to solve a puzzle. It requires physically manipulating the ticket to reveal the solution. (Being as vague as possible to not spoil anything of course.) Thankfully the game did exist alongside the internet, so it was quite easy to print out an image of the ticket, or just look up the solution if you bought the game second hand. As someone who didn't play many games growing up, it was my first experience of a real life fourth wall breaking moment and younger me thought it was a really cool idea. :D

The X-Men solution was notorious at the time. I remember the solution was repeated multiple times in various gaming mags of the time.

11:53 Another problem, some versions of the Genesis, including the short-lived portable "Nomad" version, lacked the reset button entirely, making the X-man game impossible to complete on those versions of the console.

I love how when in the video it says "it's time to end this" I immediately get an ad

I genuinely loved Boktai. My parents weren’t huge fans when I came inside with second degree sunburns after wanting to play in strong sunlight.

A game called 'Trace Memory' for the DS had a great solution to a puzzle that involved halfway closing the DS and looking at the picture reflection on the screen. Blew my mind the first time I played it.

OneShot: Often throughout the game you have to close the game down to let the character you control: Niko, sleep. There's also puzzles throughout the game that has you digging through your system files and even moving windows off the screen and pulling them back out. I have made lots of comments but this is the one I hope gets into another video.

Wasn't there a bit in MGS1, where you were told a radio frequency was on the CD case....that turned out to be the back of game box irl

Suggestion: Weird things characters do when you leave them idle for a while Crash bandicoot: nonsense Saboteur: smoking and drinking Gta SA: Carl Singing

I'll be honest, when I saw the title I thought it was referring to things in real life that don't effect gameplay, like tilting your head/body in real life hoping it'll help you peek around the corner in game.

Did no one play The Secret World, where multiple quests required doing things outside the game in order to progress quests inside the game?

what about that one puzzle in Phantom Hourglass where you had to close the lid of the ds and do nothing to "copy" the map into the other screen? think the only people that got past that without looking up a guide just got frustrated and shut the game, then came back the next day to the puzzle being solved.

When I first saw the scene from Thimbleweed Park, I thought it was an X-Files game 😂

Evolving eevee: pokemon. Sure, you have the stone evolutions, but 2 evolutions are directly linked to the game clock: Espeon and Umbreon. You have to grow your friendship and wait until morning / night to get the one you want. Takeshi's challenge: There is a singing challenge. You actually need the famicon because you need to actually sing.

"Every episode of Star Trek with the holodeck in it..." ah man that killed me. Those holodecks are dangerous AF, probably the real reason the Federation doesn't use money is from all the holodeck related lawsuits.....

I assumed you would talk about having to read the codec code off the case in MGS. But does anyone know that in the Psycho Mantis fight you can prevent him from "reading your mind" if you shoot the heads off the busts in the room? It's for people who can't use the second port for whatever reason.

The PC Game In Memoriam, also known as Missing Since January. It required you to do real-world research into obscure historical figures, and find websites the developers had set up that mixed real history with game lore. Then you started receiving real e-mails from characters in the game.

Nobody gonna bring up Infamous: Second son that had a whole quest chain where you had to use clues given to you in-game to solve puzzles on a real world website? And there was one for each mission in the quest chain so that's multiple times you have to mess around online to continue said chain.

Sylanders Swap Force should be on this. In the final battle with Kaossandra you have to remove your Skylanders from the portal to find her when she hides.

The code to the secret door in the Outside Xbox game that hasn’t been made yet, is definitely in this video somewhere..

I'd like to take a moment to appreciate Thimbleweed Park. Easily one of the best adventure games made in years. Thank you for not letting the medium die.

Hotel Dusk even does the "close the DS" trick a second time when you need to perform CPR on someone.

Doki Doki Literature Club: To complete the third act, you have to go into your game files on your computer for the game and delete the character

The earliest example I can think of is StarTropics, where you needed to take a letter that was included in the box and dip it in water to reveal invisible ink that had the code required to continue the game. Crazy for an NES game (and unfortunate for anyone who lost that letter)

I remember that X-men game, it did my head in. I only hit Reset when I gave up in frustration, because I didn't understand the clues

“Qr codes are obsolete” Coronavirus would like a chat..

Minish Cap also had you doing the "yell into the microphone" thing. In a bit of a twist, the NPC who asks this of you then reveals that you could have just snapped your fingers in front of the microphone and passed the test. (EDIT: Upon further investigation, Maxie is right. But now I don't know what game I was thinking about. Maybe Contact?) An even better example is P.T., though. The final puzzle requires you to be wearing a headset with a mic and whisper a particular name into the mic at a certain point to trigger the phone call that says "You have been chosen". Unfortunately, the software that detected this was not very good and picked up false positives from ambient noise, leading to players thinking it was just random. Actually, now I think of it, P.T. gives us an even MORE Kojima example. At one point you listen to a recorded message that seems to an English-speaker to be creepy insane babbling, but is actually a perfectly coherent message in Swedish. Why Swedish, when the game was made in Japan and written in English? Because at the time, the biggest streamer in the world was PewDiePie, who was from Sweden, knew the language, and had a well-known preference for horror games. So the solution to this puzzle was to look up PewDiePie's channel and listen to him translate for the viewers what the message said. Kojima, you magnificent bastard. Oh, and now that I think of it #2: the cult-classic NES game StarTropics came with a letter, allegedly from the protagonists uncle. A certain puzzle requires you to dip the letter in water to reveal a message written in invisible ink. Didn't work so well, since this puzzle occurs a fair ways into the game, and many players had lost or misplaced the letter by then, so the solution was eventually revealed in an issue of Nintendo Power magazine.

Infamous: Second Son had a sidequest you had to solve on a (now defunct) website portal where you broke into the intranets of in-universe corporations to learn their dirty secrets and track down a serial killer

That reminded me of The World Ends With You, where there were some (sleeping) enemies that you could defeat only by closing your DS, putting it to sleep mode. Additionally, in order to get your battle pins to evolve in certain ways, you needed to close your DS and not play to get a particular type of PP, or even set your DS in mingle mode and have contacts with other DSes in mingle mode to gain yet another type of PP.

No Monster Rancher? Literally use all my CD collection just to find a good monster.

"Unbelievably smug expression" hahahaha I nearly spat my coffee. British sarcasm is great. :D

What about indie heartbreaker OneShot? That game literally requires you to manipulate the game files in order to unlock the true ending! Niko still makes me want to cry.

What about The Black Watchmen? You play as a secret agent investigating paranormal things. The lowest agent level involved surfing around websites created specifically for the game, or emails. The highest agent level is only given to some players who apply, but from what I've heard, they had to run around in their city, collecting puzzles that are scattered, interacting with NPCs (hired actors), having vans parked around their own house, and having mysterious packages sent to their home.

The Talos Principle did the QR code thing too; if I recall correctly, some of them were extremely obtuse clues that pointed you towards getting some of the hidden stars or sigils. And in The World Ends With You, there were a handful of secret Pig Noise enemies that each had a specific gimmick you had to use to defeat them. One of them started the battle asleep, and nothing you did in the game would hurt it. The fact that it was asleep was the hint--you had to put your DS to sleep by closing it. When you opened it up again, the Pig Noise would be instantly defeated. Victory! :D

What about Metal Gear Solid 3 and the alternate way to beat the End? Instead of sneaking around and shooting him you could wait 30 days and he dies of old age. (Or you could fiddle with the in game clock)

What was that game several years ago where you had fighters that could have different stats depending on the scanned UPC codes you could enter into it? Nevermind, after a few googles, I found it: *Barcode Battler* (Epoch Co., Ltd) 1991-1995 *Barcode Battler II* (Epoch Co., Ltd) 1992 I don't know why I suddenly remembered that one. Never played it or knew anyone who had the stupid thing. I just remembered it from some video game ads.

In infamous second son, they had some extra content where you'd go have to trigger stuff online on their website and find codes in order to progress. It was kind of neat at the team and gave the game a bit of dark mystery backstory with some real immersion.

In the continuation game for Hotel Dusk, there's another puzzle similar. You need to take a key from a music box, but the mechanism that you use to open the chamber with the key can't fully open unless the box doesn't sound. So you have to almost close the DS (Just until the music stops) while pushing the button for the mechanism keeping the key, then open the DS and you got the Key. i loved those games. Deeply.

14:47 Psychomantis: "YOU LIKE BOYS!" Snake: "YOU CAN READ MY MIND?!" Psychomantis: "No." Snake: "$#*@"

Seeing lots of love for Phantom Hourglass, but anyone remember The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks? The Spirit Flute was essential for unlocking new railways and progressing, and you had to blow into the microphone while moving the flute on the touch screen to hit the right notes. Even the final boss fight required the Spirit Flute.

Evolving the cake mix pokemon in pokemon sword, you need to keep spinning.

I'm really happy Thimbleweed park got mentioned, I absolutely adored the game and love seeing it get more attention.

LoZ:ST most of the game revolves around you blowing into the mic of the ds or with PH where you have to close the lid for a map icon to appear or when you want to get the claw for 200 rupees and you have to make as much noise that the mic can pick up

What puzzles me (heh) is whether you guys have every gaming platform since the dawn of time in working order, and every game for them, or a warehouse full of clips from all those games. Edit: AND the required expertise to clock all the games or at least reach the point you want a screen-/video grab of.

In Bowser's Inside Story for the 3DS, during the boss battles where Bowser turns into a giant, you need to actually blow into the microphone to make him use his flame breath. But not just any little blow either. To do any sort of decent damage, you needed to really fill your lungs up and control your exhale to draw it out for several seconds. I really had a whole new empathy for the big guy after just the first of those fights was over.

@10:19 I’m sorry Jane but I must disagree. The technical term is “The Moriarty Effect.” Which is the name of my new band!

'Another Code: Two memories' also made you close the DS. You find an ink pad and stamps, then close the DS to create a stamp picture.

In The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, you need to close your DS to transfer a map hint

I know it's old, but Startropics on the NES still has the best instance of this. Taking the note from your in-game uncle that was included with the manual and submerging it in water to get a code needed to progress was the coolest damn thing to me as a kid.

In Monster Rancher for PlayStation you had to open the system, remove the disk and replace it with a CD to summon new monsters. Each disk would make a unique monster that you could train and combine with your other monsters. The monsters only lived for so long though and that was tragic.

There's also the time where Metal Gear Solid used to require you looking at the back of the box art to get Meryl's codec frequency, but this was slightly averted by: 1. If you asked the Colonel enough times, he would just give it to you. 2. On the digital 'PSOne Classic' copies of Metal Gear Solid, you can flip through the digital game manual to find the "box art". Also... The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. When you had to close your DS to press the Sacred Sea Crest against your map to have its location saved. You couldn't mark down the location on your map and go there, you literally had to close your system in order to progress in the game. This is fine and all, but this gimmick is the first and last time it's used in ANY Zelda title, and evidence all over the internet shows just how infuriatingly silly the idea for this puzzle is. Not to mention that the solution is even less intuitive if you're playing it on the original 2DS. Because you can't fold the console without breaking it, you have to use the Sleep Switch that was purposely made for the cheaper system. Talk about bending the rules.

Monster rancher for ps1 had you switch out the disk for any cd or other games to make monsters to grow and fight

"Every Star Trek episode with a holodeck in it" got a chuckle out of me.

I can't confirm myself because I didn't know what a black light was when I played Boktai but apparently a black light could be used to charge your weapons inside. At least according to the Neoseeker forums. I thought the game was so cool, but I only had the original GBA so when I sat in the sun I could barely see the game because of the glare off of the screen.

No love for one shot? I played that game as a kid and it's still one of the most meta titles I've ever seen. The intro sequence is even meta!

I'm kind of surprised Oneshot wasn't on the list. At various parts of the game it creates new files on your computer that you have to check out and solve puzzles with in order to progress.

What about in Hate Plus, where you actually have to go and make a real-world cake to get past a certain section? If you don't take long enough, *Hyun-ae scolds you for not taking this seriously, and you still have to wait it out, but now with a sense of shame. Fortunately, she gives you several options for how long it'll take to make a cake, including a microwave mug cake that only takes about three minutes. There's even an achievement if you send the game developer a picture of yourself eating cake with *Hyun-ae (though one person sent a picture of cake flavored vodka, and that was considered okay).

It may just be an achievement, but Fable Anniversary Edition requires you to connect your game to the now defunct Xbox 360 Smartglass app. I will forever be at 49/50 achievements because I played this remaster too late

fun i just finished ninja gaiden again on my nintendo ds and it still took me so long to defeat the boss

"Solid Snake would just be a weird euphemism"

Another Code: Two Memories (Trace Memory in North America) had a 'close the DS' puzzle which involved using block prints to make a picture. There was also another puzzle where you had to partially close the DS, in order to utilise the literal reflection from one screen to the other in order to solve it

My favorite will always be StarTropics. It blew my young mind when I finally figured out that the code I needed was hidden on the real physical letter that came packaged with the game.

Jee last time I was this early my friends enjoyed playing dnd with me (That is to say, never. I’ve never been this early and I don’t have anyone to play dnd with :/)

The entirity of Tearaway basically, you have to project your thumb into the game from the back touch screen to kill enemies and you had to take pictures of things in real life to give textures to the paper animals in the game. At some point you also have to point the camera at yourself so the protagonist can meet you. Very weird game, but also very awesome.

What about evolving Inkay into Malamar on the 3DS? You have to flip it upside-down a particular way when it levels up to a certain range.

My favorite thing for the first time I played Metal Gear Solid was that since I rented it from blockbuster, I didn't have a CD case with her codec frequency on it, so I had to call my friend for it.

Infamous second son is on here I suspect? **Looks at spoiler list** Oh... well oxbox? Your move.

Pretty sure the photo app on iPhone can scan QR code’s automatically

Phantom Hourglass had a lot more than just blowing out candles. There were enemies you had to yell at too, and a moment where you had to close the DS to "press" your map against the other map.

In the MMO Secret World Legends, almost all of the Investigation Quests involve you tabbing out to look up something on the internet. A good example being the quest "Crime and Punishment" where you have to go to a fictional character's real blog and read it to figure out what the code to his cellar door and password to his computer are.

What about The Legend of Zelda: phantom hourglass where you have to close your DS to get the sacred crest to transfer onto your in game map.....figured that one out in a moment of frustration and the classic Zelda chime playing to my surprise

I really want to thank the oxbox teams for not only continuing to make videos during the pandemic considering one of their core onscreen members literally can’t leave her house and just making it feel like business as usual with a template shift. It’s been comforting that you guys can continue doing your entertaining best despite the world being on fire.

How about a list for "Games that integrate the DLC perfectly into the main story." For players that pick up the GOTY editions, they'll usually get a bunch of preorder content unlocked right out of the gate, extra maps for a dead multiplayer, or extra post-game content that takes place in a different area. What we're looking for here is games that blend the DLC into the main story. For example, the Director's Cut of Deus Ex: Human Revolution integrated the Missing Link mission into the main game.

I'd vote Stanley Parable, for the "Go Outside" Achievement, where you've two options to achieve: Actually wait 5 years before playing again, or cheat via adjusting your computer clock, which also requires doing stuff outside the game anyway. Though I guess "do nothing for 5 years" technically doesn't count as doing things in real life...