I think Pony Island constantly did things like that, but maybe for it it was "in the box", expected?

EDIT: Ok maybe not, if "out of the box" means that it is something outside the game itself, like on the OS level and such. How about the Metal Gear Solid on Playstation then, didn't it require you to switch your controller to the other game port in order to fight one baddie, you just had to figure out you had to do that? I haven't played the game myself that far, I've only read about that in MGS. Also not sure how that works in the PC version?

Eternal Darkness on GameCube did some very similar things, though you were kind of forewarned.

Basically it had an insanity meter that increased everytime you saw an enemy and decreased when you killed one (or used a spell).

When it got high enough all sorts of things could happen. Here's a list of a few I encountered;
You enter a new room and are on the ceiling instead of the floor (this can take quite a while to figure out)
Monsters continually spawn until you die.
Your arms fall off and you die.
The game pretends to have shut down your console for a few seconds.

As I remember most effects occurred upon entering a new room, and once the effect ended you would be back having just entered the room and realising none of it was real.

Fun game.

I think it depends on the game, with some it can be immersion breaking i guess, but if the general tone or sense of humour is crazy enough it can be fun.

Like that one adventure game were you have to listen to some kind of morse code but the player character cant understand it, complaining that the surrounding is too loud - took me a while to figure out you had to go to the game menu and disable the background music for that puzzle ;)

Obsidian are great for this kind of thing. Well, I assume all those crashes to desktop and eeeendless bugs are a part of the game. They're in most of them.

I suppose another example might be the Zelda games on DS where there is at least one puzzle that involves closing your DS to transfer something from one screen to the other.

One of the bosses (a telepath) even told you which games and genres you like to play. The game read the save files on your memory card and pasted the games into the dialogue ;) Then he told you to put down the controller and used his telekinetic powers to move it around (a pretty cheap trick done with the vibration motors, but still funny). That was quite unique on the PlayStation.

Here's a video of the scene

"Out of the box" and "outside the box" have very different meanings.

* The former being in statements like "it works out of the box", meaning you don't have to do anything to set it up, it just works - possibly that the game does something as soon as you start it the first time, before you do anything in it - like you don't have to finish the game (or create an account on a different service) before you can play multiplayer as it works right out of the box, or maybe the game doesn't work and just throws up an error message out of the box (ie. you haven't tried to install mods or otherwise messed with it).
* The latter is found in "thinking outside the box", ie. things that go outside the understood conditions, or are not expected - like a game "crash" being intended, and a save you don't recognise being loaded when you start it up again (because games usually act within their own little box, the only savegames they usually create automatically are autosaves of your own path so far, and they don't usually place files elsewhere on the system).

Though dtgreene used both, I assume the latter is what's intended.

Do you know if the PC version has anything similar, or are those omitted on it? I happen to have both the PS and PC versions of the game, but I have only slightly played the PS version.

I've only played it on the PS1, so I don't know. But I don't think he can read your Memory Card on PC :P I guess computers are just too different for that little trick. Maybe the "I'll move your controller" part is still in there when you have a controller plugged in? But I don't know...

Maybe the PC version goes like "Oh, you are using Windows XP SP1, have 2 GB or RAM, an ATI Radeon X800 Pro graphics card and only 10 GB of free hard drive space?!? Bwahahaha, I will finish you now!"

I guess I need to find out, not sure how hard the PC version is to get to work but that's why I have a couple of retro-PCs too...

Also interested to know how the PS1 version works on a Playstation emulator. I presume the rumble feature is not necessarily supported, but maybe if the emulator supports virtual memory cards, but then they tend to have save-anywhere (snapshot) too...

The keyboard serves as the second controller, even if it's what you were using anyway.

My game does all sorts of crazy shit out of the box.

You pinhead! That's just a glorified Rubik's Cube!

This post demands to be high rated. :D

PS1 emulators do support virtual memory cards, and you can save and load just fine from them; an emulator may even emulate the time it takes to save the game. A game that checks the memory cards will check whichever virtual card is loaded.

Some emulators may create separate cards for each game; on those, a game won't see saves made for other games by default, so you'll need to copy the card images or change the emulator's configuration for another game to see them. (One example of when you'll want to do this is the Arc the Lad series, where a save in one game can be imported into the next, and where Arc Arena requires an Arc the Lad 2 save to work.)

Emulator save states, on the other hand, can't be read by the game.

Incidentally, with the right hardware it's possible to transfer save files between console and emulator.