This is a thread to talk about games that mess with players' expectations or rules (like Psycho did for movies). Here are some examples I've come up with. What are some more you can think of?

#1: Super Mario Bros. 2/Lost Levels.

Jeff Ryan wrote:

In this game, the first mushroom would kill Mario. Boom, dead. Miyamoto could never pull a stunt like that with an arcade game: folks would demand their quarter back.

Quote:

If the first game had Mario schlep his way up a pyramid to get a 1-Up, this one would create a similar obstacle course that led to a worthless poison mushroom. Mario’s warp zones took him forward in the first game? The warp zones in the sequel might take him back to the beginning of the game. Level after level, Miyamoto was pranking the player.

From the book Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America

#2: Eternal Darkness
What is real? Eternal Darkness had a sanity meter that dropped when you encountered enemies; if it dropped to low you'd start experiencing a loss of reality. A description from the N-Sider preview of the game:

Quote:

"It's one of the elements in the game that I think people will really enjoy," says Dyack. "As players come against these things that are totally unbelievable -- things they have never seen before -- they begin to question what's going on and their ability to deal with things is diminished. That affects gameplay and how the player feels. If your level of sanity becomes very, very low, weird things are going to start to happen." Players can actively keep their sanity level stable, however, they've got to figure out how it's done. This feature is designed to make you doubt not only others' actions, but also your own. Denis Dyack remarked that "There are times when you don't know if what's going on is a delusion or actually the real game."

This new feature allowed the developer to prank the players in all sorts of ways. One particularly devious prank was [SPOILER:1a684d84da]an early congratulatory game over screen in the 3rd chapter. I've heard that someone actually returned the game saying it was too short only to be explained to by the store clerk that they'd been pranked.[/SPOILER:1a684d84da]

#3: Gradius 3
Gamers should all know the Konami code. It gave great things to players who used it except in the SNES Gradius 3 where upon entering the code [SPOILER:1a684d84da]your ship explodes.[/SPOILER:1a684d84da]