Web Video / Outside Xbox

From left to right: Mike, Ellen, Andy, Luke and Jane.

Outside Xbox is a website and YouTube channel hosted by Mike Channell, Jane Douglas, and Andy Farrant with video editing by James Hills and produced by Jon Garnham. The hosts cover primarily Xbox 360 and Xbox One games and create list features, a weekly show called "Show of the Week," and Let's Play videos, as well as occasional videos on game previews, snippets of gameplay, tips, guides, and achievements.

It has three spinoff channels, and one podcast:

• Outside Xtra, which allows the cast to discuss gaming topics that aren't necessarily relevant to Xbox games, and is presented by Ellen Rose and Luke Westaway. Luke announced he was leaving in April 2024, saying that he wanted to concentrate on composition and tabletop game design; however, he would continue to be present on Oxventure.
• OxShorts is a channel where the crew upload Behind-the-scenes shenanigans (such as delving into their backrooms and showing off what they find), released in one-minute-long videos to accommodate for Youtube Shorts.
• Oxventure is an Actual Play channel where the cast play Tabletop RPGs. The flagship series is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that originated as a one-shot special episode to celebrate Outside Xbox achieving two million subscribers, and has now been running for over five years. It now exists in podcast form as well.

See also PlayStation Access, a similar show, also UK based, but focusing on the PlayStation line. (Outside Xbox was initially founded by Xbox as a rival to Playstation Access, but Outside Xbox split away from Xbox and got bought by Eurogamer, and the two channels no longer operate as direct competitors, getting along rather well.)

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Tropes used and discussed in Outside Xbox/ Xtra List videos:

A - Z

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: "7 Weird Things That Only Make Sense in Games" features many videogame tropes on that page, and a few that aren't, that make little sense in reality:
  • Selling things at a shop, even weird stuff like bear hides and berries. Overlaps with We Buy Anything.
  • Invisible inventory items you can carry around with you at all times.
  • Crouch and Prone with Concealment Equals Cover, in that crouching in games is usually denoted as being part of stealth gameplay, when in some cases it could be louder, as you could fall over much easier.
  • Many games let you see through walls, and oftentimes without explanation.
  • Eating in games (like in Breath of the Wild) heals you.
  • Speeding through the in-game clock in games so you can get to time sensitive events faster. The example used is The Witcher III, which has Geralt literally sitting in the middle of nowhere.
• Accidental Innuendo: Invoked in 7 Filthiest Names in Videogames that Will Always Make Us Giggle, which documents some very unfortunately named characters (Cream the Rabbit, Spankey the Monkey), names for a corruption (the Taint), items and item tree names (Sticky White Stuff and P-Organ), and hardware (The Wii and the Thrustmaster line driving sim peripherals) that come off as this trope to audience members. The video itself is also filled with deliberate innuendo to work around describing the filth and to avoid getting demonetised.
• Achievement Mockery: Has been covered more than once:
  • 7 Times you got mocked for trying, so never try again.
  • 8 Embarrassing achievements you don't want on your gamer card.
  • 9 Sarcastic achievements that made us feel like idiots.
• Amusement Park of Doom: The topic of "7 Unsafe Theme Parks That Would Be Condemned Immediately", which has examples from Sam & Max Hit the Road (a firebreather who wrecks everything, and vermin in the whack-a-mole section) and The Park (which is haunted).
• Artificial Stupidity: The subject of "7 Times You Were Grateful Enemies Were Dumb".
• Artistic License – Cars: The topic of "7 Times Cars Don't Work That Way, You Guys", which has the channels' resident car enthusiast Mike Channell rundown a load of car tropes that videogames use that are not reflective of real life. Among them include:
  • Mike talks about unrealistic drifting, such as those in the Outrun games, and then references Saints Row: The Third, where you are able to drift a garbage truck!
  • Mike points out how realistic games tend to sharply avert Gasoline Lasts Forever, like Deadly Premonition, where the SUV in-game does an insanely bad 16.2 Miles Per Tank, with a total output of under one mile to the gallon. To put that into any perspective, there are Ferrari Supercars with better MPG than that!
  • Mike explains how Nitrous works in real life, and how it works in-games, which to everyones' delight, is not terribly unrealistic. In fact, the only complaint he had was the use of nitrous boost in mid-air, which doesn't make you go any faster (as it does in lots of arcade games).
  • Mike points out that if everyone in GTA V's online mode didn't have the option to break physics, then nobody would be able to get anywhere in Los Santos due to a Chronically Crashed Car.
  • Cars + Fuel = Explosion. Mike has problems with this logic in games, generally that, depending on the developer, either the car is one stray spark from exploding, or as safe as anything ever produced, with no inbetween.
  • Using your car to sideswipe other people on the road to take them out. Mike points out how preposterous it is for cars to do this. The Batmobile gets a pass as it's at least plausible to think it can be equipped for it, but a regular old van?...not so much.
  • He calls out Battlefield 4 and Far Cry 4 in a segment called "Mechanical Stuff". In the former, he talks about the opening level in which the crew get stuck in a car underwater, yet are able to talk to each other as though the vehicle became completely watertight within seconds. In the latter, he calls out the auto-driving feature that all the cars have, asking how a buggy in the mountains of Kyrat can have a feature like that when Google is still nowhere near that stage.
• Artistic License – Space: Topic of "5 Times Games Got Space Really, Really Right" is all about how videogames and films depict space (and as Jane admits, is mostly an excuse to talk about Mass Effect 2 and how that game handles space):
  • Jane admits that even nerds like her like Explosions in Space, but gives extra props to games who do an almost-silence, to give off the quietness of space, while still having an explosion sound effect. She also notes that games like Dead Space depicts noise with underwater-sounding muffling.
  • Jane notes that videogames tend to withhold heat in their ships, but at some point, you have to release it, or you'll cook yourself alive.
  • Jane applauds Kerbal Space Program for sticking to Newtonian laws of physics "with an iron fist", and thus, mercilessly averts Space Friction.
  • Jane describes Space "as frictionless as Teflon-coated-Teflon", and notes that Shepard from Mass Effect would've turned into a human meteor as they'd burn up on re-entry.
  • Jane discusses the science of Explosive Decompression, and how that there simply isn't enough air for the hurricane-style equilibration and explosive consequences it brings on in science fiction. Jane mentions Portal 2's ending, which they claim is the most accurate a game has been, and that if poorly wielded, the Portal Gun could be used as a Weapon of Mass Destruction, as you could rapidly decompress the entire Earth.
• Ascended Glitch: The focus of one video, "7 Glitches That Became Beloved Features".
• Ascended Meme: "7 Videogame Memes So Good They Made it Into the Game" lists several, including a T-shirt of Sanic in Sonic Forces, Guiles theme from Street Fighter II going with, well, everything, appearing as a cheat code in Megaman X Street Fighter, among others.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: "7 Biggest Bosses That Made You Feel Like A Tiny Baby"
• Awesome, but Impractical: "7 Weapons That Seem Awesome But Are Totally Impractical".
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: Discussed in "7 Bosses That Were Immediately Killed by a Much Scarier Boss", along with the commenter edition.
• Becoming the Mask: "7 Hitman Disguises That Agent 47 Was Way Too Into", which lists 47's brief moments as a drug dealer in Hitman 3's "Apex Predator" mission, 47's fashionista days in Paris' "The Showstopper" mission in Hitman (2016), and 47's time as an estate agent in Whittleton Creek's "Another Life" level in Hitman 2. They all depect 47 acting in odd, unnatural ways, and in the case of the latter, dryly selling a house.
• Border Patrol: Subject of "7 Genius Ways Games Stopped You From Escaping Them" and the first and second "commenter editions", which all deal with games that stop you from leaving the playable area, be it with In-universe reasoning, or by using sharks or deadly, deadly fish. As Ellen mentions, they didn't realise how many examples there were, how creative they could be, and how fun they were to record and play. This is also one of the few list video topics to get more than one "commenter edition" sequel video.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Referenced by name after a Quiplash answer a of "Cheese, Wine, Eating lots of Cheese and Wine".
• The Can Kicked Him: Killer toilets were discussed in "7 Toilets With a Higher K/D Ratio Than You".
• Celebrity Crush: Used occasionally as the basis for jokes, but straight examples are generally avoided. For example, in "7 DLCs That Literally Lost the Plot: Commenter Edition," Ellen initially seems to have one when Nathan Fillion shows up, but...
  God Himself, voiced by Fillion: I have a situation.
  Johnny Gat: Look, man, I really just wanna go home.
  God: I owe you.
  Ellen: (coyly playing with her hair) Oh, you owe us? Well, uh, how about... a drink? Maybe dinner? (drops any attempt at being smooth) Just tell people that we're cool!
• Chest Monster: The subject of the video "7 Harmless Items That Are Definitely Not Monsters".
• Clipped-Wing Angel: 7 Brutal Bosses with Hilariously Weak Second Forms.
• Creator Killer: invokedExplored in 7 Disastrous Games That Sank the Company. Either due to delays, the games being overhyped before launch or, in the case of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, having the misfortune of coming out just months after The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that completely overshadowed it, resulting in fewer sales than expected (and the game would have been needed to massively sell to save the studio from the extremely poor gestation of its budget, even if it didn't have the competition).
• Creepy Doll: "7 Creepy Dolls That Are a Hard Nope from Us" talks about the trope, including Angie from Resident Evil Village and the titular star of Poppy Playtime. In the end, Luke talks about the horror of watching all of those dolls only for James to say he edited the video so he spent longer.
• Cutscene Incompetence:
  • "7 Cutscenes Where You Forgot How To Hero".
  • "7 Times You Inexplicably Became an Idiot in a Cutscene".
• Degraded Boss: "7 Bosses Who Got Demoted to Regular Enemies".
• Developer's Foresight: "7 Games That Predicted Your Nonsense" features some developer anticipations of player behaviour (such as Leon from Resident Evil 4 (Remake) buying and using a rocket launcher to open up pathways in places the rocket launcher would not be used in).
• Don't Fear the Reaper: "7 Times Death Wasn't So Bad, Actually".
• Dual Boss: "7 Bosses Who Couldn't Beat You Without Bringing A Friend".
• Dummied Out: Invoked as the topic for: 6 Secret Things Cut From Elden Ring They Didn't Want You to See and 7 Secret Things They Cut From Your Favourite Games.
• Ear Worm: Everyone gets a chance to rant about their (least) favorite game music, in "7 Infuriating Songs We Wish We Could Get Out of Our Heads."
• Enfant Terrible: 7 Scariest Babies That Prove Parenthood Is The Real Nightmare is about babies in videogames being evil, or rather, being horrifying you have to fight against.
• Evil Is Cool: "7 Villains Who Were a lot Cooler Than You, Unfortunately" is all about discussing this trope.invoked
• Fate Worse than Death: "7 Fates Worse Than Death You Gave Your Unlucky Enemies" counts the times games did this, such as in Mortal Kombat 11 where Frost freezes you, and puts the unlucky opponent into a cyborg ninja.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Topic of quite a few videos, but 7 Terrible Hiding Places You Somehow Got Away With stands out as that deals with guards being particularly clueless to various hiding places, such as massive wardrobes (Hitman), Moving Barrels (Wind Waker), Hay (Assassins Creed), The Infamous "Box Trick" (Metal Gear Solid), and gigantic conveniently-placed crates (Hitman, again).
• Go-Karting with Bowser: "7 Times Deadly Enemies Took a Break for Volleyball Etc" shows cases of game franchises invoking this trope, including Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball and the Trope Namer Bowser racing against Mario in Super Mario Kart.
• Lethal Joke Character: The topic of various fighting-game videos, notably "7 Most Bizarre Fighting Game Characters" and the later released "7 Fighting Game Joke Characters Who Are WAY Stronger Than They Look"
• Green-Skinned Space Babe: 7 Alien Races That Look Like Beautiful Human Women by Amazing Coincidence.
• Helpless Window Death: The subject of "7 Tragedies You Couldn't Prevent Because They Happened Behind Glass, Damnit" and its commenter edition.
• Internet Jerk: Discussed in a roundabout way with "7 Things Bound to Happen When You Play Healer", where Ellen and Luke list off examples from popular games about how players treat their support characters (which is to say, as if they were gravel underneath their boots).
• Loads and Loads of Loading: Viewed positively in "7 Ways Loading Screens Are Good, Actually", which shows off ways that waiting for a game to load can be worth it, including interactable loading screens which let you practice, view models or lore, or just give a bit of entertainment.
• Lethal Joke Item: The topic of 7 Joke Weapons That Were Surprisingly Effective. The list includes a water pistol being in Metal Gear Solid V to take down a literal fiery boss battle with ease, Dead Rising 2 and its toy ping pong ball shooter and its unique gamecode quirk of the shots counting as a throwable object, not a bullet (making a particular helicopter boss hilariously easy), and the Money Bundle from PAYDAY 2, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin ...a money bundle. Its effectiveness is mentioned because of it's Stun Lock properties, which are among the highest in the game, meaning the police can't fire back so long as you keep hitting them.
• Meta Guy: The subject of 7 Times a Game Was So Meta It Freaked You Out, examples include Spyro and Hunter from Spyro: A Hero's Tail, Deadpool just being Deadpool, and Spider-Man from Ultimate Spider-Man explaining double jumps that he himself breaks the laws of physics. It also received a 2nd edition; "7 Times a Game Was So Meta It Freaked You Out: The Return".
• Monster Clown: "7 Scariest Clowns to Ruin Your Next Birthday Party".
• Morton's Fork: The 6 Hardest Decisions in Games (That You'll Get Wrong Either Way).
• Moving the Goalposts: The topic of 7 Times You Thought You Were Done But You Were Just Getting Started, to the point where Andy says the trope name verbatim in the intro.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The subject of the "7 Times You Thought You Were Helping, But Doomed Everyone". They also remark that the subtitle of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings was actually the title of their video, given how many times Geralt does precisely that.
  • More instances of times heroes ruined everything are discussed in "7 Videogame Heroes Who Ruined Everything".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The subject of the "6 Villains Who Saved the World By Accident" video.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Subject of "7 Villains Obviously Based on Real People". While the video lists seven main examples, the hosts mention other villains too, such as when talking about Andrew Ryan being based on Walt Disney, Jane also mentions Joey Drew and Cave Johnson.
• Obvious Judas: In-Universe. "7 Totally Trustworthy Characters Who Definitely Won't Betray Us" is about this trope applied to characters in games.
• Poison Mushroom: 7 Worst Power Ups That Screwed You Over; the thumbnail is also the Poison Mushroom from the Mario series.
• Red Shirt: The subject of 7 Redshirts Who Never Stood a Chance in Space
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Invoked as the topic of "7 Extreme Difficulty Modes People Invented for Themselves", which includes the usual suspects; Low-Level Run (the Dark Souls "Onebro" challenge forces you to not go past level 1, which means you're locked out of a lot of weapons and tactics), Minimalist Run (Don't use Cappy in Super Mario Odyssey as much as possible) and the Genocide Run (Killing everyone on the level in Hitman).
• Screwed by the Lawyers: invokedThe subject of 7 Great Games You Can’t Buy Anymore, Because Lawyers crossed with Temporary Online Content. Games include:
  • P.T, which was removed from online stores due to the infamous kerfuffle with Hideo Kojima and Konami
  • The Deadpool videogame got removed twice from stores, the first time was because the licensing deal between Activision and Marvel ran out a mere 2 months after the game had launched, it got re-released onto stores a few months before (and totally not because of) the Deadpool movie. It's second removal was because... the license ran out. Again.
  • Outrun Online Arcade got removed because of the Ferrari license running out.
  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game got removed due to the Films's associated studios' licenses running out.
  • The Nintendo eshop ports of Tetris got removed due to (allegedly) Ubisoft acquiring the rights to the franchise
  • The Addams Family Pinball game got removed due to the license not being renewed.
  • The Lego: The Hobbit game was going to get a sequel DLC pack to end its film trilogy, but all the games were taken down in January 2019 for unknown reasons.
• The Tetris Effect: There's a video on "7 Perception Altering Games" (thumbnail title) or 7 Games You Played so Much You Saw Them Everywhere (text title). The description even ends with "Nooo Tetris, get out of my brain!" and indeed, Tetris is first on the list, with the trope name spoken during its entry.
• Take That, Audience!: "7 Times Games Roasted The Haters" has cases in which games have roasted complaining fans, while one case includes mocking a critic's comment on a prior game.
• Undignified Death: Topic of the "10 Most Embarrassing Hitman Kills You Don't Want in Your Obituary", which has Reza Zaydan get killed by a falling Khazi, Marcus Stuyvesant and Carl Ingram falling to their death after sabotaging their parachutes when the alarm goes off, Rico Delgado being fed to his own hippopotamus, and Killing Dalia Margolis by throwing her off the balcony onto Viktor Novikov during a fireworks show.
• Video Game Movies Suck: invoked Some planned but cancelled video game movies during the era in which such films are poorly received are discussed in "7 Cancelled Video Game Movies that Were Probably Going to be Terrible".
• Video Game Remake: "7 Worst Remasters That Ruined Beloved Games" features this as well as Porting Disaster by nature of the video. As Andy lampshades at the start, the video was basically an excuse to talk about the issues with the then-recent GTA Trilogy remaster.invoked
• Weird Currency: The topic of the "7 Weirdest Things You've Used as Money in Videogames".
• Welcome to Corneria: The subject of the 8 Repeated Voice Lines You Need to Hear a Few More Times video, with examples from Skyrim ("I was once a warrior like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee"), Ocarina of Time ("Hey! Listen!"), and Kingdom Hearts II ("Get on top of the Hydra's back!"), among others.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Subject of the Skills We Can't Believe We Had To Unlock list and the follow up video, with Jane naming the trope in the latter video.

Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra videos contain examples of:

Outside Xbox

• 419 Scam: The intro of "7 Jerks Who Tricked You Into Doing Terrible Things" has Mike talk about how people can tell you to do stupid things like share bank account details with someone claiming to be a prince.
• '80s Hair: Parodied in a Show of the Week discussing 80s-themed Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, with a VHS tape of an 80s-era Outside Xbox episode. Yes, before the Xbox was released. Jane's hair is blonde and makes her look like the main singer of Kajagoogoo.
• '90s Hair: During COVID-19 quarantine, Luke could not go to the hairdresser and therefore grew his hair out, swapping his short-back-and-sides hairdo for a longer set of shaggy curtains that would not have looked amiss on a Backstreet Boy. It was generally considered to be a good look, and remained until mid-2021, at which point he returned to his former quiff.
• Accidental Misnaming: In the video introducing the hosts of Outside Xtra, they jokingly misname Mike as "Mick".
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • Mike blowing up "The Chef" Elusive Target in Hitman with a Remote Explosive Duck, and somehow only killing the chef, not harming his entourage, and being able to walk away without being noticed. This coming from a person who not even a few seconds earlier, struggled to work out the inventory controls for equipping the Explosive Duck.
  Andy: Man, this is bull-Sound-Effect Bleep, how do I walk around the level and make all these plans and you just throw a duck at someone.
  Mike: I knew my playstyle would finally... pay off once. And this is it!
  • He does it again in the Dartmoor level of Hitman 3, where he got a Silent Assassin rating and five stars, despite having almost no idea what he was doing and firing a shotgun blast in Alexa's office to drop the chandelier on her.
• Acting Unnatural: When his character is in disguise in games like Hitman and Grand Theft Auto Online, Andy will often keep up a running commentary of his character's awkward attempts to interact innocently with other characters.
• Agent Mulder: Discussed during an Halloween livestream, when Luke decided to dress as Mulder for a costume.
  Andy: What's going to happen is all of the aliens will leave and then five minutes later, Scully walks in.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: invokedIn the Mario franchise, Luigi is a Shell-Shocked Veteran and Peach is a sadistic tyrant. And let's not even get started on Ninji's whole situation.
• Angrish: When a Sentret flees in the Pokémon GO Generation 2 catch race, Ellen stomps off muttering furious gibberish.
• Animal Motifs: Luke is associated with birds: he has a particular expression that Ellen calls his "angry owl face", and has made a Running Gag out of flamingos. Ellen herself is often associated with cats (and occasionally geese).
• Apologetic Attacker: Both Jane and Mike apologise profusely as they kill the infected victims in Hitman (2016): Patient Zero.
• April Fools' Day: The 2017 April 1st episode of Outside Xtra's "Show of the Weekend" began with a prank that revealed that the whole 'second channel' thing was itself apparently just an elaborate prank on the audience orchestrated by the Outside Xbox hosts. Unfortunately for them, Mike forgot to tell Luke and Ellen that the whole thing was just a prank and that their jobs weren't real...
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Before discussing Armed and Dangerous's Shark Gun on 7 Horrible Weapons You're Definitely the Bad Guy for Using, Andy discusses what happens if a weapon that reverses gravity brings realistic side effects: countless bystanders will likely die, the planet destabilizes, crops fail, and shoes become hats.
• Artifact Title: In "7 Stupid Decisions That Killed You Instantly", Andy mentions that one of the few bad decisions he's made in his life is naming the channel OutsideXbox, as the channel consistently covers many games that are multi-platform, and hasn't been specifically about the Xbox for almost a decade now (The name is a reversal of the official "Inside Xbox" magazine that Andy was working with at the time). This is also mentioned on the channel's website:
  Andy was part of the original UK Inside Xbox team, which was both wildly popular and the reason for Outside Xbox's now faintly ridiculous name.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: In Show Of The Weekend 15 Sep 2018, Ellen is so overjoyed upon hearing that THQ Nordic have acquired the IP rights of Kingdoms Of Amalur that she turns into an entity of pure bliss. Upon hearing that Forcier still owns the publishing rights, and therefore there's not much chance of a remaster or a sequel being made, she reverts back to normal in sheer anger and attacks Luke for telling her this.
• Ascended Extra: Having gained attention for creating the artwork for the team's Dungeons & Dragons adventures, which have been used on the channel since A Spot of Bother, Bendix later appeared alongside Mike & Luke in the July 27th 2018 livestreams.
• Ascended Glitch: When doing a Let's Play Of Kingdoms Of Amalur, the subtitles for the NPC dialogue fragment "time for work, boys" stayed on screen for ages. This was eventually made into a T-shirt.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Mike sometimes acts like this. Especially when the "shiny" object in question is a car or related to cars. Andy has a similar reaction towards historical topics, such as the wild west.
• Audience Participation:
  • Some lists on both Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra have a Commenter edition, which list characters, games, or other moments not touched on in the original list that commenters feel were left out of the list. The viewers that suggest these are credited for the entry along with their comment.
  • Every Show of the Week/End's third act is reading and responding to commenters.
  • Commenters got to name Marston's horse in the Red Dead Redemption playthrough. The current favourite is Horse-on Welles.
  • Their live-streams also tend to double as Q&A sessions for their commenters, at times to the point where they'll get so caught up in a discussion stemming from one of the questions that the game they're currently playing becomes a bit of an afterthought.
• Author Appeal:
  • All five hosts have at least one favorite game that they can't stop gushing about:
    • Andy's favourite is Red Dead Redemption . The Let's Play for that game seems to exist primarily because it's one of Andy's favourite games and he lost his 100% save. He's also into fighting games in general, with a whole playlist being dedicated to videos he's made about weird fighting games, or aspects of them.
    • Jane's favourite is Mass Effect. She did several Let's Play about Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect: Andromeda, did a whole video about Artistic License – Space to talk about Mass Effect 2 and another to talk about her Andromeda's space training.
    • Mike's favourite is Forza. He's also very keen on Dark Souls.
    • Luke's favourite is The Legend of Zelda. While not exactly a favourite, it's also a bit of a running gag that he is apparently the only member of the Outside X-team that likes Super Mario Sunshine. He's also a huge fan of FromSoft games along with Mike, in particular Elden Ring having trained novice Ellen in the titles.
    • Ellen's favourite is frequently presented as being Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It is revealed in one video that there is apparently a protocol banning Ellen from mentioning it simply because she'd take every opportunity she could to gush about it.^note Although her devotion to the game may be exaggerated a little for the show, as Ellen has stated a few times that Kingdoms of Amalur is not her favorite game as much as it's her favorite underrated game. She's also very fond of the Assassin's Creed and Tomb Raider games. Also, due to her fondness for cats, she is rendered completely insensate by Stray, that included a video of her gushing over the protagonist cat over a hundred times in two hours.
    • James has been mentioned to like EVE Online. He's also fond of Football Manager. When asked why he likes it, he responds "Because it is good,"
      Commenter: Give that man a seat on the sofa!
    • Producer Jon is also fond of The Legend of Zelda. Specifically, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
  • In non-game related examples:
    • Andy's specialist subject is history^note in particular, he is fond of American history, and he seems to have particular fondness for pirates and cowboys.
    • Mike loves cars and knows a lot about them. If there's a car-themed entry on a list video, there's a good chance Mike will be the one hosting it. He's also done many different videos dedicated entirely to car games (and one counting down Artistic License – Cars transgressions in games).
    • Luke loves dinosaurs (except for Tricky) and 18th century sailing ships, and appears to have a fondness for LEGO as well. At one point, he remarked his favorite historical figure is Admiral Horatio Nelson. His favorite play is Les Misérables
    • Jane has a master's degree in physics and knows quite a bit about particle physics and astrophysics. Typically, scientific discussions in video games have her take center stage.
    • Ellen is really into cute animals, particularly cats. During "Showdown of the Weekend 2018", Luke mentions that she's told him about every cat she's ever met, and guesses that the answer about her having a small dog thrown at her is false, because she would have mentioned the breed.
      Ellen: If there's any opportunity for me to make a fuss about a cute animal, then I will take it.
• Author Tract: Their "7 Funny Easter Eggs That Were Shady In-Jokes" video is all about dark in-jokes and Easter eggs in games. One example from The Witcher 3 is a quest called "The Tower Outta Nowheres", which, as Andy explains, is a thinly-veiled dig at Game DRM turned into a playable mission. The tower in question is protected with a Defense Regulatory Magicon spell, which has stopped a wizard who purchased it pre-owned from accessing the tower. Geralt must defeat it with the help of a magical book called "Gottfrieds Omni-opening Grimoire", which, by complete chance has the same initials as GOG.com (owned by Witcher publisher CD Projekt) then defeat the monster inside said tower. Once completed, the tower disappears, and Geralt is dumped unceremoniously into a lake.
• Ax-Crazy: Ellen has literally^note not literally tried to kill Luke with a hatchet on-screen twice.
  • The infamous "egg room" in her Animal Crossing: New Horizons house did nothing to allay anyone's concerns.
    Luke: I'm not sure I would say 'for every occasion.' I really feel like there's one occasion that's catered to here, and it's the murder of me. By Ellen.
• Bad "Bad Acting": The video introducing Outside Xtra has a segment where the Oxbox team introduce the new hosts "in their own words" while obviously reading from scripts and using hammy unnatural body language.
  • Also "Seven Heroes Who Were Terrible Actors".
• Bad Boss: Played for laugh, as with everything else. The Oxbox team in general and Jane in particular. So far, Luke and Ellen have mentioned that they had to work over Easter or Jane would feed them to the Mimics from Prey (2017); Jane's Suspiciously Specific Denial of doing something to Luke; Mike and Andy are mind-controlling Luke with a mirror The Last Guardian's style; Jane has inflicted "productivity scorpions" on the Xtra team. Both Luke and Ellen also live in terror of being sent "back to the video game mines" if their channel doesn't perform up to snuff. Luke is also contractually obligated to carry the Oxbox team around on piggy-back on demand.
• Batman Gambit: When Alex Lolies from Dicebreaker joins the group for a game of Werewolf, she pulls off a masterful ploy against the Outside Xbox/Xtra crew to catch the werewolf, believing that Johnny was the least likely to be the Werewolf she levelled an accusation against them to see which other players would agree with her, which causes Jane to reveal herself and win Lolies the game.
• Beach Episode: Mocked by Mike when Jane suggested Mike's cinematic intro to a racing event was an anime she and Andy would watch.
  Mike: Let's go to the beach and not advance the plot!
  Andy: Man, I hate these filler episodes.
• Berserk Button: Each host seems to have one regarding inaccuracies, whether they see it in a game, or are told it by someone else. Andy's is historical or literary inaccuracy, Mike's is vehicle inaccuracy, Jane's is scientific inaccuracy, and Luke's is paleontological inaccuracy (i.e. getting dinosaurs wrong).
  • Luke has a special one in the frost troll the Seven Thousand Steps up The Throat of the World mountain in Skyrim, bringing it up across multiple list features and livestreams. This culminates in an epic Big "NO!" moment when he encounters the troll completely by accident while doing Christmas challenges.
• Big "NEVER!": In their "7 Spammy Moves You Loved to Spam" video, Andy hosts an entry featuring Scorpion's famous Spear special move.
  Andy: When you think of great harpoons in works of fiction, as I often do, there are a few standouts. Ahab's harpoon from Moby-Dick, Jason's harpoon from Friday the 13th, Edward Kenway's harpoon in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. I could go on, and I do on my Tumblr, AndysFavoriteHarpoons.tumblr.com.
  Mike: [off-screen] Stop plugging your harpoon Tumblr!
  Andy: [shakes fist] Never!
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • In the 7 Animals You Can’t Pet Because I Guess The Game Hates You video, Ellen uses French to lament the lack of pettable cats in the Assassin's Creed series:
  Ellen: Mais le petit chat est trop beau! [angrily] Je veux le chat!^note But the kitty is too beautiful! I want the cat!
  • Their stream of the 2021 Xbox E3 showcase had Arabic subtitles which were impossible to change or remove. The bonus was strongest during the Stalker 2 trailer, in which the Arabic subtitles overrode the English subtitles for the Russian dialogue. Mike said "At least the viewers will all have learned Arabic by the end of the show."
• Black Comedy Burst: Some pitches during the "Patently Stupid" livestream evoke this. Hate the sound of traffic? Get Andy's Belmet, a helmet containing stinging bees, and then traffic noises are now the lesser concern. Can't fit into shoes? Mike's Ankle Grinder saws off a bit of your foot.
• Bond One-Liner: On "Show of the Week" for Blood Dragon, the OxBox crew try their hand at coming up with Bond One-Liners, and discover it's a lot harder than it looks.
• Brain Bleach:
  • On "Show of the Weekend" for 6th October 2018, Ellen said that after playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, she wanted to have her memories wiped so that she could play it again for the first time. After playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, she just wanted to have her memories wiped.
  • "7 Tricks by Game Developers You Won’t Be Able to Unsee" is based around developer techniques to save on time, or are otherwise too complex to implement such as animating the exchange of items by showing movements implying a handoff (as it's really tedious to animate), letting shoot people off ledges by making "ragdoll magnets" so they always do this (because it's cool to the player), and don't animate getting people dressed (as that's also really hard and tedius to animate. Jane quotes Brad Bird; director of The Incredibles, as a source for how hard it is to do cloth simulations, so it's no wonder game developers don't want to try their luck either), among other things.
  • "7 Surprisingly Harrowing Deaths of Cute Characters" has Andy respond to Elise kissing Sonic with disgust, and he seeks Sonic fanart to cleanse out the imagery from his eyes.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In their "7 Dumbest Mistakes by Evil Corporations in Videogames" list, Jane details the thought process of a hypothetical recent college graduate who's been hired by ExoGeni Corporations:
  Jane: "Sounds great!", you thought, taking that graduate job with them fresh out of college. "I'm going to make a difference in this galaxy!", you thought. "There's no way they'll turn me into a hive-mind plant zombie in a secret off-world experiment!", you thought.
• Brick Joke: Xtra jokes tend to get at least one secondary appearance: the time-travel Pikachu, Luke's time trapped in the studio over Christmas, getting trapped in shipping containers, Bud Fensler, the Secret Order of Early Festivities, and so on.
  • "7 Beloved Features Bizarrely Cut From the Sequel" opens with Ellen pitching "mortgages for dogs" as an example of a good idea that bizarrely hasn't caught on. The seventh and final topic of the video is the dogs in Watch_Dogs 2, prompting Luke to go on a rant about how dogs never have to pay for their accommodation, referring to them as "furry little mortgage-dodgers".
• Brief Accent Imitation: Andy and Jane take potshots at Emperor Palpatine in "7 Games That Fixed Screw-Ups With a Re-Release."
  Game narration: You are now the Emperor's Voice.
  Jane: I am? Good! Your voice sucked! "Dewit." "Dewit." (unintelligible, sinister noises)
  Andy: (joins in from offscreen)
  • In the Link's Awakening streams, Ellen gives Crazy Tracy a roughly-Essex accent.
• Buffy Speak: In the Worst Spiders In Games, Ranked By An Arachnophobe - Commenter Edition video, Ellen describes a giant spider in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as a "big, horrible, tarantura-ly type thing".
• Butt-Monkey:
  • While Jane and Andy have their mishaps, no one suffers more than Mike Channell.
  • As the recent hires and junior members of the team, whenever Outside Xtra hosts Ellen and Luke show up they tend to be (jokingly) treated as dogsbodies.
  • During their third livestream of Among Us, Mike was the first player killed four times in a row over the course of several games. In the next game, he managed to avoid it by being the Imposter...and then he got found out and was ejected. Then, in their fourth livestream, while Mike was able to enjoy several victories as both the crewmate and the Imposter, Ellen took the mantle of "being the first to be killed".
  Johnny: Can we all agree that, next game, no one kills Mike unless it would be really funny.
• Butterface: In one Show of the Week focusing on Grand Theft Auto V, Mike, who has Grand Theft Auto Fever, briefly sees Roman Bellic's face on Jane's body.
• The Cameo:
  • Before being "revealed" in the 2M subscribers video, James Hill had a couple of appearances in some comedic bits. In one, Andy demonstrated his nodding-through-interview technique with him, and in another, he's a Pokémon GO player who wandered in the studio. He also had an entire series to himself in 2013 in which he played State of Decay.
  • Ellen first appeared on the channel playing Rise of the Tomb Raider co-op with Andy several weeks before Outside Xtra was announced, while Ellen was still part of Xbox On.
  • Johnny Chiodini, formerly of Eurogamer and Dicebreaker, served as Dungeon Master for almost all of the various Dungeons & Dragons adventures, as well as being a player character in the Blades in the Dark spinoff.
  • Rob Pearson from PlayStation Access made a quick cameo on two separate occasions; in a video about weird game cameos, and in this video about characters being good at sniping.
  • Aoife Wilson, of Eurogamer, is a semi-frequent guest: She accompanied Luke on the Resident Evil 7 live-action tour, performed a discussion with Luke on their shared love of Bloodborne, and took over as Ellen's tutor in "Ellen's Souls Academy" when Luke was out on paternity leave.
  • Ian Higton, also of Eurogamer, was in a livestream with Mike and Ellen when playing a Hot Wheels deathmatch game, and, along with Aoife, plays in Among Us tournaments.
  • Bendix, who works for Eurogamer and created much of the art for the Dungeons and Dragons series, appeared in the July 27th 2018 livestreams
  • Ben Borthwick accompanying them for their early forays into GTA Online
  • Alex Lolies and Michael "Wheels" Whelan also join in on Among Us tournaments. The former also joined in a game of Werewolf, while the latter came into the studio to play a tabletop game with Luke and Ellen in 2019 when no video games were released in a week for them to discuss.
• Catchphrase:
  • Whenever they're doing a Let's Play of a military-themed game (such as Battlefield 1) and screw up in a humiliating fashion, the player (usually either Mike or Andy) will often quip "And that was my war."
  • "Loophole!" for when discussing Batman's no kill rule.
  • Whenever a video game character gets too bothersome with their demands, they will, more often Jane, sarcastically remark they want " a moon on a stick".
  • Any time a player character is forced to hide within a box, crate or similar from numerous enemies hunting them, most likely after an attempt at stealth gone badly wrong, the player will remark that "this is my life now".
  • Particularly disastrous moments in playthroughs will often be met with some variation of "It's fine, everything's fine."
  • Luke has a tendency to plaintively ask "Why do we fight?" whenever he's trying to weasel out of a combat scenario that isn't going very well for him.
  • Things going wrong for either the characters in-game or the hosts out of it will be met with "This is the one thing we didn't want to happen."
  • Luke and Andy really like the phrase "Wellity wellity wellity" for some reason.
  • Averted with "That's freaky-deaky!", which Luke tries to put forward as Ellen's catchphrase over her vociferous objections.
  • Ellen is prone to asking "how in the heckins" she'll do something.
• Chess with Death: In one Show Of The Week focusing on Darksiders 2, Mike plays video games with the Reaper to get him to revisit his friends as a ghost.
• Chirping Crickets: In the "7 Crazy Witcher Moments" video, when Mike comments that the unicorn incident from The Witcher "gives a whole new meaning to 'horny on mane.'"
• Christmas Creep: Mike alludes to the Easter equivalent, describing Ready Player One as having "more Easter Eggs than supermarket shelves in January".
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • Jane opens the Show of the Week with the Titanfall Drinking Game with an incredibly profane rant about nothing in particular.
  • During a video in which Mike previews the bosses of Cuphead, there’s quite a lot of swearing due to how challenging they are.
  • During one show, Andy mentions that he has to censor James whenever he talks, because if his voice is heard, they have to pay him more. James responds with a censored rant so profane it disturbs both Andy and Mike.
  • From the "7 Annoying Enemy Types" video, Ellen is not a fan of the explosive Personal Space Invader enemies from Control.
    Ellen: (flailing) Aaagh! F(bleep) piss sh(bleep) (bleep) aagh! (pulls herself together) I mean, bloody hell.
  • Ellen also uses the "7 Effed-Up Secret Levels" video to... vent her frustration at the Octodad controls. It takes her a while.
• Code Emergency: Easy to miss, but in the outro of "7 Horrible Weapons You're Definitely the Bad Guy for Using'', Andy mentions an apparent "Boss Baby protocol" for when Mike gets too caught up praising the film during a shoot.
  Andy: [off-screen] What'd I tell you about bringing up Boss Baby?
  Mike: It won an Oscar!
  Andy: That's it, cut his mic! Boss Baby Protocol!
• Comedic Sociopathy: Jane is prone to this when her mad scientist persona is being played up, such as by claiming everyone's food as part of an "experiment".
• Comically Missing the Point: The "Sequels That Flipped the Script" video includes a sidebar in which Andy remarks on the fact that the game Battlefield 2 was the sequel was not Battlefield or Battlefield 1, but Battlefield 1942 — which he pronounces as if it were the sequel to 1,941 earlier Battlefield games.
• Conspicuously Public Assassination: Admittedly, games like Dishonored, Hitman (2016) and Hitman 2 often allow or require this, but few players make it into an art form like Mike "stealth" Channell does. Have a look (this video includes a couple from Andy and Jane as well).
• Crack Defeat: This happens a lot during streams of Mario Party, when the player who played the worst tends to end up winning.
  Andy: THIS GOD DAMN GAME!
• Curse Cut Short: At the very end of Show of the Week for 9 February 2018, Andy finally gets access to gaming news:
  Andy: RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 HAS BEEN DELAYED WHAT THE FU— [video ends]
• Cute Kitten:
  • "7 Stupidest Ways Humanity Got Destroyed" starts with Ellen saying "There's never a good way for humanity to be wiped out, unless it's some kind of kitten supernova."
  • Stray also has Ellen gush over the cat about a thousand times over 8 hours of play.
• Cuteness Proximity: Fairly common, especially in Xtra videos. If a character has a cute pet, there will be cooing. Consider yourself warned. Ellen in particular is susceptible.
  • Invoked with the "please stand by" title cards to the Outside Xtra livestreams, which feature a couple of pictures of adorable looking otters in the hope that they will make the wait more bearable and mollify the viewer, as one of the captions reads "Patience is a virtue, they seem to say".
  • Ellen reched new heights with the release of Stray, and the channel released the videos Grown Woman Cries At Video Game Cat and 124 Times Ellen Lost it Playing Stray (The First 2 Hours)
• Cuteness Overload: Ellen, who is well known by long-time fans to be a sucker for all "fuzzy wittle animals", was literally brought to tears by the game Stray, in which the player controls an admittedly very adorable cat:
  Ellen: [crying and barely able to speak coherently; sniffles] I love this game so much... oh, my God...
  [the cat jumps down out of a bucket and makes a cute little "mew" sound upon landing]
  Ellen: [lets out a whimper, drops her controller, and sobs as she buries her head in her hands]
• Darker and Edgier: Invoked In-Universe by Ellen when discussing Dark Souls, when she made Luke take a cute animal mascot he created in the style of Crash Bandicoot and turn him into a terrifying Dark Souls boss.
• Dastardly Whiplash: In the 12 Evil Achievements for Heartless Bastards, Andy explains the appropriately named achievement: "Dastardly" from Red Dead Redemption, which sees you hogtie-ing a woman to some train tracks, and watch them get run over. Andy then quickly reveals the correct way of watching is by twirling an old-timey moustache and laughing evilly at your deed. Cue Andy doing exactly that.
• Deadpan Snarker: All three engage in this but Jane stands out to the point that her character was used to demonstrate the sarcastic options in Fallout 4.
• Death Glare: Luke tries to historically justify the anachronistic nature of For Honor to Andy while suffering under a near constant glare of seething disapproval. Andy also got to pull it out when Ellen made a Norse myth pun related to God of War (PS4) (asking if Luke was Loki excited, or Hela excited), prompting her to attempt to hide behind Luke.
• Disappointed in You: In "6 Annoying Kids Who Make Us Glad We Don't Babysit Anymore", Ellen says "I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed." Beat "FURIOUSLY disappointed."
• Disproportionate Retribution: Another player wrecks a heist they're doing in Grand Theft Auto Online, so Mike decides to blow a cool half mil on hitting him with a Kill Sat.
  Mike: Never let it be said that I'm a vindictive person, but I'm going to marshal the Star Wars program to blow his head off.
  • In "7 Bosses You Could Only Run From," Andy fires both Luke and Ellen^note (not really) for making too many puns.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Ellen has to put a penny in a jar every time she gets distracted by how dreamy she finds the Outsider from Dishonored.
• A Dog Ate My Homework: There was no "Show of the Weekend" on 12th May 2018. The reason given was "a dog ate it." There was a Clip Show instead.
• Don't Try This at Home:
  • The team sometimes make cocktails from video games. Some go better than others.
    • After misreading the recipe for a cocktail led to putting a handful of nutmeg into the cocktail shaker - which is a legitimately toxic amount of nutmeg to put into anything - a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen stated "Spoiler: This is a dangerous amount of nutmeg. Like seriously, a dangerous amount. Do not eat this much nutmeg ever."
    • Their video of the Dragon Flame cocktail from Hitman 2 included the "don't try this at home" warning because it is vile: it includes chili and raw egg and looks like vomit.
  • "7 Funniest Minigames Where Hurting Yourself Was the Point" had this warning stated in video before introducing the first item. Given that the video was discussing games where one would get hurt on purpose, it's completely justified.
• Doomed Moral Victor: After the 2018 Xmas Charades game, when the Outside Xbox team narrowly miss coming back to win after a good second round, in the spirit of good sportsmanship Luke claims that Outside Xbox won a moral victory even if they didn't win the game overall. Unfortunately, he underestimates the lack of good sportsmanship on the part of the Outside Xbox team, particularly Andy, as they start dancing around and gloating as if they had won an actual victory. This prompts Luke to offer the amendment that it becomes less of a moral victory the more Andy gloats, before finally swearing off claiming moral victories altogether.
• Drives Like Crazy: Basically everyone. Lampshaded by Jane, while being strafed by a fighter jet in Grand Theft Auto Online:
  Jane: I'm trying to drive erratically, but it's no more or less erratic than I usually drive.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Jane, Andy, and Mike originally shot their videos standing while facing the camera full-on. It took a while before they started sitting in the wooden chair they now use.
  • The Outside Xtra's introduction video implied that the Outside Xbox crew are their puppet forced to stick to their script. Compare that to their current status as the Oxbox team's Butt-Monkey.
  • Early episodes of "Show of the Week" tended to go to more places in the studio and feature things like tips for completing achievements, general game news, and so forth. The presenters also used to swap around in the different sections more, and the furnishings and general studio appearance was also quite different. Over time, they adopted a tighter format involving two presenters starting on the standard green couch discussing the game of the week, one presenter meeting the third by the bookcase to go through a feature (or, later, a challenge) and the user comments, before the first two presenters meet back on the couch to close the episode.
  • The channel also initially featured more behind-the-scenes content related to the games they were discussing, including interviews with the production teams. This is a lot rarer now.
  • Swearing is normally both rare and censored nowadays, but this video from 2012 and this video from 2013 both have open swears; the first in a clip from a game, and the second in the voiceover.
• Eat Me: "Seven Bosses You Killed From The Inside Out, Ew".
• Eating the Eye Candy: Ellen's crush on the Outsider notwithstanding, there are a couple of passers-by in the "Ducktales Karaoke" video who are clearly checking out Andy and/or Jane as they're singing.
• Edible Theme Naming: Discussed by Ellen and Luke while discussing names for cats. They both lose it at "Tray Bake."^note This is the British term for bar cookies, but may also refer to a combination of meat and vegetables roasted together in a pan.
• Egopolis: Oxboxford, the team's project in Cities: Skylines is very much this, with the OX roadways, and the giant statue. It does, however, overlap with Wretched Hive in this case, with the university (and sole educational facility) called the Jane Douglas Institute, the hospital Dr Andy's Horrortorium, and the crematorium Mike's Grill.
• Epic Fail:
  • Everyone considers Mike's In-Universe to be a game of PAYDAY 2 when he throws a grenade to alert an entire bank about five seconds after the mission starts.
    Andy: Yeah, Mike, what happened here?
  • The time that Jane tried to parachute into a military base in Grand Theft Auto V only to mistime the landing and face-plant straight into the ground and lose a life also tends to get mentioned quite frequently. As does the time Jane once tried to bail out of a jet plane she was flying only to get hit and killed by her own plane while doing so.
  • Ellen and Luke's Christmas challenges are played head-to-head, and twice, Luke had soundly thrashed her. The first was a footrace from Helgen to Riften in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the second was sneaking up on a deer in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and riding it to Kakariko Village. Luke clocked in at five minutes in compared to Ellen's almost-thirty.
  • Also in the Christmas challenges, twice Ellen has attempted to use some in-game medium to draw a Pikachu^note in a corn field using a combine harvester in Farming Simulator one year, using the GLOO gun in Prey, and twice it has been found by Andy, in his capacity as a blind judge, to be subpar. In particular, his review of her second attempt was harsh enough to border on being a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. And to add insult to injury, both times while they were doing it Luke had commented that he thought Ellen's was better than his.
  • Battlefield 1 had a particularly crazy instance in which Mike needed to flush out some enemies who were one floor above him in a lighthouse. He throws a grenade at them, only for it to bounce off the hatch and fall back towards him. Mike tries to dodge, but falls down three flights of stairs inside the lighthouse and break his legs. Then, the grenade rests beside him and finally explodes, killing him.
  • In a train simulation video game, Mike manages to lock himself out of his own train while it slowly moves away from the station.
    Mike: Yeah, I've got no excuse for that one.
  • During a social deduction game in which the players need to find a werewolf, the group manages to kill two innocent villagers^note Mike is voted to be executed, and Jane, as a hunter, kills the innocent Ellen, leaving Andy to lose the game because the two werewolves got away scot free in one round.
  • During a playthrough of Among Us, Mike manages to miss two corpses in a row. He even stands on top of them.
    Andy: I think we've established that Mike isn't very good at this game.
  • During a 9-player game crossover with Eurogamer and Dicebreaker, guest player (and Oxventure DM) Johnny Chiodini manages to get the entire group to vote them out when they casually mention that they encountered Mike's corpse, despite the fact it was an emergency meeting called, not a corpse report, and therefore no one else even knew Mike was dead. ^note For added hilarity, Johnny was not the imposter.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: At one point, Jane Douglas claims that the "eleven herbs and spices" used by KFC must be a lie, because there aren't eleven herbs and spices. She then tries to come up with a list, managing salt, pepper, and five-spice, making seven.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Jane may be a Mad Scientist with aspirations to take over the world but she protests strongly when Andy contemplates killing horses in Red Dead Redemption.
  • Mike has spent the entirety of his Hitman (2016) career as a Mad Bomber who immediately goes for the most over-the-top elimination possible and defaults to lethal solutions, an approach that has led to his record being something like nineteen non-target kills. The final mission of Patient Zero, in which the virus gets truly out of control, leads to so many casualties even he starts feeling bad about all the killing he's doing.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Ellen has a VERY strong girl-crush on Evie Frye.
  • Likewise, Jane's reaction to Lady Dimitrescu won't be forgotten anytime soon.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Luke's Kingdom Come: Deliverance Survival Simulation is a bit excessive, to the point where choosing to have a bit of a lie-in causes Ellen to lose a life to dysentery.
  Luke: (sing-song) Medieval life was horrible!
• Evil Laugh: Jane may be the Token Evil Teammate, but Andy's got her beat in this regard. The aforementioned "evil achievements" video was just the beginning...
  • The Cities: Skylines Let's Play, when the subject of Dr. Andy's Horrortorium comes up.
  • The "scarecrow murderer" incident in Hitman (2016).
• Evil Teacher: During one list video, Luke badly plays a clarinet and comments that Miss Halsley that he'll master the embouchure...only for an assassin^note actually cameraman James in a hoodie to rise behind him and suffocate him with a clarinet.
  Assassin: Miss Halsley sends `er regards.
• Face–Heel Turn: Andy attempts one for about, ooh, eight seconds in a video about good guys turning into bad guys and getting cooler thereby.
• Facial Horror: While trying out NBA 2K15's face scan feature, the presenters are left screaming at the horror that is Jane's mangled in-game face.
• Failed a Spot Check: When playing Among Us, Mike tends to not notice the dead bodies of his fellow crewmates or, as he puts it, he has "corpse blindness".
• Fanon Discontinuity: In-Universe.
  • In the episode "7 Games Too Ambitious For Their Own Good", Jane says that she liked all three Fable games. And that there were only three games.
  • According to Andy in "7 Amazing Sequels That Rescued The Series from Total Disaster", the Fallout series stopped at Fallout 4.
• Fanservice:
  • "8 DLCs That Were Ridiculous Fanservice And We Loved It" is about non-sexual Fanservice.
  • If Jane is covering a Resident Evil entry on one of their list videos, there's a good chance that she'll mention Chris Redfield's physique at least once.
  • In another non-sexual example, Jane's "Dark Lady Galadriel" impression made a lot of nerds very happy.
• Fate Worse than Death: Referenced in this video, in which Andy claims that a Black Hole is only second-worse than a Nickelback Concert on the proposed list of "things you don't want to be near your face".
• Fluffy the Terrible: Mike draws a Venus Fly Trap screaming "Feed me!" during a Jackbox livestream in which the contestants draw weapons to commit murder.
  Johnny: Whoever drew that, I want you to get away with it. Because that is adorable!
• Food End:
  • Andy's Sharpie rewrite of Heart of Darkness ends this way.
    Andy: ...and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. And then they all went for ice-cream sundaes.
  • During a discussion during Show of the Week, a discussion about a breakfast menu seen in a video game causes Mike to leave in the middle and go for brunch. The last scene has Jane narrating the ending while Mike eats pancakes.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • On the 25th January 2020 Show of the Week, Mike and Andy talk about some of the games that have been delayed for 2021, or for late-2020 with surprising amounts of sincerity, and with very few jokes being made on the topic, outside of predicting at games being delayed. This is due to the show topic being about videogame crunch periods, a very sensitive topic matter for the show to handle, and something which both Andy and Mike wholeheartedly dislike. Andy points out that the delays don't even stop the crunch periods from happening, and references an article that had developer CD Projekt talk about Cyber Punk 2077, who outright admitted they enforce crunch periods to get the game done, regardless of delays, which didn't sit well with any of the crew. It's a truly unusual episode of a show that is otherwise lighthearted normally.
  • Ellen attempting to work out the cash value of the currency games give you for free, when compared to purchasing it instead. The video, while still having moments of levity and a lot of Corpsing (this is Ellen after all), is by-and-large serious and is one big lesson about how intentionally confusing these sorts of microtransactions are to most players, all to push them to pay real money instead.
• Friendly Pirate: The Dungeons & Dragons Actual Play series consists of this:
  • Andy's character, Corazón de Ballena, is technically the least ethical member of the party apart from Prudence. But he still comes across as a downplayed example by way of being a Loveable Rogue.
  • Rust-on-the-Harbour from the "The Corn Ultimatum" adventure is a straight example, being a cheerful French accented tabaxi assassin who agrees to help the party for the princely sum of 1 gold (and even manages to win over Corazón eventually).
• Full-Frontal Assault: One of the challenges in the Oxbox Xmas Challenge for 2015 was the Nude Mayor Punching. Repeated again for 2016 in the Nude Jarl Punching. And again in 2017 with the Nude Elder Punching challenge. Curiously, Mike selected this challenge every year.
• Fun T-Shirt: So, so many. Recurring ones include Luke's Silent Princess shirt, Jane's Solaire shirt, Andy's "Kojima" shirt, etc.
• Fun with Acronyms: Discussed in a couple of list videos, but the crew have come up with their own as well.
  • FLAMINGOs never say die.
  • Jane and Andy's Evil Genius 2 livestream had several S.P.E.C.T.R.E.-style acronyms proposed by the viewers, such as C.E.P.H.A.L.O.P.O.D.^note Criminal Enterprise Predicts High Anticipated Levels Of Profit—Or Death! and O.C.T.O.P.U.S.^note Optimally Charming Terrorists Obliterating the Populace Using Science.
• Gag Censor: Ellen uses a Yarny doll as a visual aid in "7 Bosses You Could Only Run From," but it's falling apart pretty badly and she decides that she hates it. One quick pixelation later, and we can continue with the video.
• Genius Loci: Andy is revealed to be the human avatar of one in the Jan 14, 2017 episode of Show of the Weekend, who in 2028 will have become too powerful for Earth's forces to contain.
  • If Andy's comments on the matter are any indication, he hasn't quite gotten to that point yet, but he's trying to.
• Genre Savvy: Commenters accused Ellen of this, during the Barista Simulator livestream.
  Ellen distancing herself from this business venture from minute ONE, by letting Luke put his name on it, is how you know she's taken a marketing course at some point in her life.
• Gilligan Cut: Luke shows John the memetic "Detective Pikachu dance," and wonders why Ellen didn't reply when he sent her the clip. Meanwhile, across town...
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Luke loses his mind while trapped in the studio over Christmas one year.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: A common outcome whenever the crew plays a management-type game (and to a lesser extent, a "Hitman" level). Highlights include ''Cities: Skylines'', ''Overcooked'', and ''Barista Sim''.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Referenced in a Hitman (2016) video that had Jane playing, Mike advising her to throw a screwdriver at the target in a crowded sauna, and Andy mentioning that might not be the stealthiest course of action. There is even a photoshopped Andy's face on an angel and Mike's face on a devil.
• Got Me Doing It: Andy when describing Shovel Knight's "Butt Mode" in this video.
• Green-Eyed Monster: A running gag in their Red Dead Redemption Let's Plays is that "Horson Welles", John's horse, reacts like a petulant Clingy Jealous Girl whenever he sees John interact with another horse for whatever reason.
• Griefer: Mike ends up doing this to Andy when the team try out the "Ghost Mode" multiplayer mode of Hitman 2 during beta. Both players are assigned to kill a particular target, but their actions in the level affect the other's playthrough. Andy, of course, tries to stealth his way through the kills as he normally does when playing the game. Unfortunately for him, Mike is his usual reckless and uncaring self and ends up following Andy around causing chaos and carelessly killing the target before Andy can set up an unnoticed kill. You practically feel Andy's rage radiating from the screen.
• Hands Go Down: In the intro of "7 Genius End Credits We Actually Watched", Ellen asks who sat through end credits by choice. Hands raise. When she says "And not because you want to see the post-credits scene in a Marvel film", down go the hands.
• Happy Dance:
  • During a playthrough of ARMS, Luke and Ellen do as they go off camera. Also, Ellen does one when she wins a match.
    Luke: This is what I put up with everyday.
  • When Ellen defeated Luke at "Wimbledungeons" (a tennis simulator using tabletop-RPG mechanics).
    Luke: You can't shake hands in a gentlemanly way and then just keep dancing!
    Johnny Chiodini: Apparently you can.
• Hell Is That Noise: Ellen can perfectly replicate the paralyzing scream of a Redead.
• Hilarious Outtakes: Show of the Weekend has a section featuring outtakes from both channels' videos. Show of the Week does it at the end of every year.
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: The "6 Games That Are Better If You Just Never Finish Them" measures the ending of one of the games described in units of the death of Mufasa.
• Hiss Before Fleeing: Anytime the evil Luke is revealed, he will do this when caught.
• How Is That Even Possible?: Ellen's response to the Dante's Inferno version of Cerberus somehow being able to catch Dante in its mouth in mid-air right before he could stick his scythe into its head.
  Ellen: Aghh!! How did it even know I was there?! It doesn't have eyes! It just has mouths!
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The presenters of Xtra, Luke and Ellen, as lampshaded on both channels ^note Ellen is 5'3", while Luke is about 6'4". Even more so, Ellen typically wears her hair down in a braid, while Luke's hair is lofted up, making the height difference even more visually distinct. Played for Laughs when Ellen angrily leaves after some comments to make some tea, only to realize tea bags were on the top shelf. Their attempt to form a Yooka-Laylee-style team-up also proved short-lived when Luke realised that in practice it was just Ellen using him to reach things down from high shelves.
  • Exploited for comedy again in the "How Much Is Your Time Worth?" video, where the camera spends most of the episode focused on Ellen and her whiteboard. Luke, who is holding the whiteboard, is usually only visible from the chin downwards.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • The vast majority of list episodes subtitle each fresh entry with some kind of pun.
  • When Mike and Ellen play the Battlefront Rogue One DLC, nearly everything either of them says between the first appearance of Jyn Erso and the end of the mission is some kind of gin pun.
  • Any number of list episodes feature someone unleashing a barrage of puns while someone (usually but not exclusively Andy) boos them from offscreen. At one point a time-traveling Andy came back in time to boo one of Andy's own puns.
• The Hyena: Ellen—not constantly, but about Once an Episode. The "Powerful Butt" incident is just one example.
• Hyper-Competent Sidekick: During their Grand Theft Auto V heists, the team would often be joined by a player named Nerascus whom they've dubbed as their "intern". More often than not, the intern would perform better than the team, getting them out of tricky situations, and receiving a higher score.
• Hypocritical Humor: 7 Health and Safety Nightmares Down To Insanely Negligent Workplace Design has Andy talk about bad workplace design while uncovering some... questionable things about the Outside Xbox office including a microwave that is more dangerous than Aperture Science's testing^note with a no door option, an annual "Bring Your Alligator To Work Day"^note Andy's has rabies, a "Laser Death Grid"^note for burglars, but Mike's been using it to dry towels, the anthrax in the kitchen^note they are clearly labeled though, and the weekly fire drill^note where they're chased by a man with an on fire electric drill. Yeah
• I Take Offense to That Last One: During a social deduction game.
  Luke: Look, you can accuse me of many things, including being a werewolf. But you can't accuse me of legalese.
• If You Die, I Call Your Stuff: Andy's sole concern about Luke being lost in time is whether he can have Luke's shoes.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Done accidentally when Jane and Andy played Sheltered. One of their bunkermates, Martha, dies and Jane selects "Harvest" the corpse without realizing what that does^note A grave must be constructed first in order to bury someone, otherwise, it will turn the corpse into food. They get over it pretty quickly, and are honestly surprised it took them that long to resort to cannibalism.
    Andy: Come and have some delicious Martha meat.
  • In Cities: Skylines, this is invoked when Mike is granted naming rights to a crematorium. He calls it Mike's Grille.
    Mike: I would advise anyone not to eat anything in the staff canteen.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: On several occasions, but the "Siberian Prison" sniper level of Hitman 2 is one good example. Andy eventually gets the hang of the sniper rifle... sort of.
• Implausible Deniability: In the Show of the Week covering Batman: Return to Arkham, Mike mentions that he's been brushing up on his batarang skills. Jane then reveals that the neighbour's window was mysteriously found broken, with a batarang among the wreckage. Mike denies that he knows anything about that, and when pressed by Jane proceeds to deny that he knows what a batarang even is, and then to deny that he knows anybody named Mike.
  • In their livestreams, when Luke finishes Dark Souls, he starts New Game Plus and insists that it's a no-damage run, no matter how much damage he actually takes. At one point Luke and Johnny are insisting it's going fine while arrows are clearly sticking out of Luke's character's shoulder.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: When playing Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall, Mike decides to assassinate the target by shooting him with a pistol from across the square. He succeeds.
• Improv: Show of the Weekend on Outside Xtra is almost always twice as long as Show of the Week on the main Outside Xbox channel due to both Luke and Ellen taking more liberties with the script....and lots of tangents. Show of the Week has some improv, but is by and large far more scripted. This changed in early 2019 as Show of the Week's comments sections are very lengthy and unscripted now, bringing Show of the Week up to similar length of Show of the Weekend. It's still applicable to the earlier Shows of the Week.
• Indy Ploy: In contrast to Andy's meticulous, silent approach and Mike's "Kill Them All" style, Jane handles stealth games by approaching the targets and then looking to the environment for clues and/or opportunities.
• Ink-Suit Actor:
  • The presenters' Grand Theft Auto Online characters are designed to look as much as themselves as possible.
  • In general, Jane tries to make most of her characters look as much like her as possible whenever their appearances are customizable. Averted whenever Mike & Andy are making a custom character for a wrestling or MMA game, where they inevitably try to abuse the character creator to make the most disturbing, distorted, or absurd character they can.
• Ironic Echo: During a variant of Among Us called hide and seek.
  Luke: Ian's in the lab! I had to wait and say it so he didn't double back and get me.
  [Ian kills Luke]
  Andy: Did he double back and get you?

Luke: He doubled back and got me.

• Ironic Echo Cut: In the video where the Oxbox crew try out the Sea of Thieves chicken hunt quest, they notice Chicken Isle on the map and decide it might be a good place to look for chickens.
  Jane: There better be damn chickens on Chicken Isle, it's not just a name.
  Caption: SOME SAILING LATER
  Andy: So you're telling me there's no chickens on Chicken Island.
• Ironic Name: Not in the game itself, but in the team's playthrough of the Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus DLC "Diaries of Agent Silent Death", the titular agent's codename is rendered unbelievably ironic. Mainly due to Andy's tendency to run through the levels firing a machine gun while screaming "SILENT DEAAAAAAAATH" at all the Germans.
• Jump Scare: During the popular hide-and-seek variation of Among Us, Luke is about to walk into decontamination, to run right into the killer. He invokes the trope after he's killed, saying it was the best one of their Halloween livestreams.
• Kick the Dog: In the Fallout 4: 8 Little Ways We've Been Evil in Fallout 4 So Far, Jane details the various ways she's engaged in wicked deeds in Fallout 4, up to and including shooting Dogmeat.
  • Then there's their video on what they've done in the name of achievements.
• Kill Sat
  • Apparently Jane wants one to write her initials on the Moon.
  • In the 2018 GTA Heists, Mike acquires an Orbital laser. It costs half a million dollars to fire, plus an extra 25000 dollars if you want it to be automatically targeted. Mike uses it to obliterate a player that had been harassing and repeatedly killing Andy. This prompts the other player to respond by bringing a fighter jet and interfering with the Ox Crew's heist by blowing them up over and over again.
• Lame Comeback: When Mike compares the colour of Andy's chosen plane to an ambulance in one Christmas challenge video:
  Andy: Well, it's also the colour of...something good...shut up.
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • Andy is prone to yelling "BOOOOO" from offscreen in response to a bad pun when it's his turn to be the "designated offscreen yeller".
  • Ellen makes puns all the time, and gets boos from whoever's offscreen. Jane sometimes picks up on this.
  • The usual suspects notably switch places in "7 Cutesy Games... Commenter Edition," when Luke explains that the studio is being powered by Charmander's cuteness.
    Luke: We call it Squee-newable energy.
    Ellen: (offscreen) No we don't.
• Lampshaded the Obscure Reference: As Luke makes clear, nobody understands Ellen's Monarch of the Glen references.
• Laser Sight: Discussed when talking about Sniper Luigi from Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. Luke is worried that his previous insults to Luigi will cause him to seek revenge. Ellen brushes it off until she sees a laser sight trained on Luke's head. As it turns out, it was just Andy.
  Andy: Where's Luke, I wanted to show him this new cat toy.
  Ellen: Oh, he's just cowering in fear.
  Andy: Oh well, more cat toy for us. [shines the light] Go get it!
  Ellen: [dashes after the light like a cat]
  Andy: Awww, she's having fun.
• Last-Name Basis: During livestreams when Dicebreaker hosts Alex Lolies and Michael Whelan join in, the former is referred to almost exclusively by her last name and the latter is called "Wheels" which is derived from his last name.
• Late to the Realization: Andy during the final entry of their "8 Videogame Disguises That Aren't Fooling Anyone" video:
  Andy: Much was made in the buildup to the release of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 of new character Jaycee, a mysterious luchadora who was—
  Jane: [off-screen] It's Julia Chang!
  Andy: [taken aback slightly] ... her pendant and moveset seemed quite familiar to long-term fans of the series, some of whom theorized—
  Jane: [off-screen] Julia Chang. It's clearly Julia Chang.
  Andy: One second... then there was the name: Jaycee. J-C. Could that have any signifi—
  Jane: [off-screen] It stands for Julia Chang!
  Andy: Oh, my God, it's Julia Chang. Who saw that coming?!
  Mike and Jane: [off-screen] We all did!
  Andy: [in resignation] Yes, fine, okay.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Discussed in the 12 April, 2019 Show of the Week episode, in which Andy and Jane were talking about comments from their Red Shirt video, and one of the people on that video was L. Jenkins from Mass Effect 2. A commenter picked up on the supposed reference, and it had transpired Andy knew very little about the trope, and only its Memetic Mutation. Jane swiftly explains the general trope to Andy, even showing footage of the incident.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Sweet, bubbly Ellen is (usually) the light feminine, and sly, mischievous Jane is (usually) the dark feminine.
• Line-of-Sight Name: In Show of the Weekend: Nier Automata and the Vase of Mescutio, Ellen has to ad-lib a story about a coffee cup. At one point, she comes up with the "Dark Wizard Andy" while Andy is just off-screen.
• The Load: Exo Nebula, the "intern" who assisted the gang on some of their Grand Theft Auto Online heists proved to be more of a hindrance than a help and the trio had to actively take measures to make sure he wouldn't cause a mission failure. Mike even called the player a "Soft Lad" in frustration.
• Locked Away in a Monastery: Part of the story created during Mario Golf for Ninji. Andy has the role of Ninji's father, and finds Ninji has ruined the Christmas turkey for the second year in a row. He laments that in older times, a son like Ninji could've been shipped off to the clergy and they'd no longer be the family's problem. Mike comments that Ninji is more a man of the latex than a man of the cloth.
• Look Both Ways: Whenever the Outsidexbox crew plays Grand Theft Auto Online, they have a particular habit of being run over when crossing the road. Whether it's by each other, other players, or NPCs. An infamous example is when Andy gets knocked by a truck into the path of another car which pins him against a van which then properly runs over him followed by the second car.
• Lovable Coward:
  • Andy doesn't really do well with horror games. Naturally he's always the one with the controller when the team plays them.
  • Ellen is even worse. There are two videos specifically about how scary she finds something.
  • October 2020 brought us the Ellen's Fear Academy series of livestreams, in which Ellen plays a different scary game each week while one of the other team members provides (questionable) moral support from the observation chamber.^note Ellen does amazingly well in the face of near-constant terror. The resulting jumpscare supercut is an hour long.
• Lying to Protect Your Feelings:
  • Jane claims that her mother believes that Jane is a doctor:
  Jane: A white lie is a falsehood told to protect someone's feelings, like when you tell your mum you're a doctor instead of someone who makes videos about video games on YouTube for a living. [phone rings] Hi, Mum! Yeah, can't talk right now... I've got a bleeder! Um... I'm starting CPR! Someone get me some gauze and a crash cart and 10 CCs of... gauze!
  • During the Resident Evil Village playthrough, Jane missed the Castle Dimistrecu playthrough and, when she returned, she wondered where the tall vampire lady went.
  Andy: Oh, she's...tired and told us to continue without her.
  Jane: Where did you get that crystal tall vampire lady?
  Andy: Found it.
  Commenter: Tell her she went to live on a farm upstate with the other tall vampire ladies.
• Mad Bomber: When playing most games, particularly Hitman (2016), Mike tends to gravitate towards explosions or fire, a personality he hams up for the camera.
  Commenter: New viewer here, I accidentally clicked to the end of the video and Mike's crotch was on fire, is this normal?
  Andy:(shaking his head while Mike attempts to light matches on fire) Sadly, yes.
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: Show of the Week's viewer mail segment is introduced by one of the hosts announcing that it's time to look at the comments viewers have made on Youtube, on Twitter, or [elaborate and impractical alternative method of communication].
• Mad Scientist: Jane is the most scientifically educated of the team, and is repeatedly indicated to have a slightly more than usual enthusiasm for world domination. That said, most of her actual experiments consist of dicking around with her teammates and/or videogame NPCs.
  • Luke slips into this when testing whether VR made Resident Evil 7 scarier. When someone introduces you to "Dr Luke's Horrortorium", it's probably time to leave.
• Mafia Princess: Apparently, Ellen is one in her spare time, if her Suspiciously Specific Denial about boys and cement shoes is anything to go by.
• Magic Antidote:
  • Jane poisons Andy at one point, promising him the antidote later. When asked where he wants to go for lunch following the show's Running Gag, Andy asks if the new Chinese place down the street makes antidote.
  • In one "Show of the Weekend" episode, Jane also has a magical elixir that cures with one drop but brings the living death with two. Once Luke turns it down, she chugs it straight from the bottle.
• Major Injury Underreaction: In the stinger of one Show of the Week, Andy is murdered off camera by an Ax-Crazy Jane with a nail gun. This is represented by his voice being heard calmly remarking "Argh, nails."
• Makes As Much Sense In Context: Ellen explains Death Stranding to Luke, who replies "Am I still awake?"
• Malicious Misnaming: In "Seven Superheroes Betrayed by Their Own Crappy Game," Ellen criticizes the title of Captain America in: The Doom Tube of Dr. Megalomann for being "weird" and "hard to remember." She proves her point by misreading it in several creative ways throughout the rest of the segment.
• Medal of Dishonor: In this video's intro, Andy holds up a certificate for "most times resuscitated" in a swimming course he took in 2016. Even the clip art on the award is inverted, to make it look like he's going in head first.
• Mistaken Identity: There's actually two Jane Douglass's in the past: A brothel keeper in mid 17th century London and a Scottish noblewoman. This is addressed in a Show of the Week episode where Jane corrects an Amazon Echo to say that Jane isn't a vampire and has a perfectly normal human lifespan.
• Mondegreen Gag: In "7 Fan Theories So Mind-Blowing We Hope They're True", Mike mishears a quote from the end of the first Halo game:
  Mike: The only one to survive the complete destruction of the Halo was some dude called Dustin Echoes. This Dustin Echoes guy must be a total badass!
  Andy: [off-screen] Dust and echoes!
  Mike: Yeah, I... knew that. I was just... testing you...
• Narrative Profanity Filter: In the "7 Weirdest Easter Eggs" video, Jane goes to great lengths to avoid saying exactly what song by The Prodigy is being referenced by the line "Smack my bishop" from Assassin's Creed: Valhalla.
• No Animals Were Harmed:
  • A video about fake-out endings features a fake credits roll partway through ending with "No animals were harmed in the making of this video except that one marmoset."
  • A later Show of the Week returning to the topic also has a fake credits roll partway through, this one ending with "No animals were harmed in the making of this programme, except that one bad cat who totally had it coming, don't believe his lies."
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Played for Laughs, like many other things, but the office supposedly has loose bears, alligators, anthrax in the kitchen, and a laser death grid Mike uses to dry towels.
  • Jane, as a Mad Scientist, brings her deadly JD virus to the office and opens it in front of everyone. Luke is very concerned...that she's not wearing gloves while handling it.
• No Sympathy:
  • Played for laughs. When playing Grand Theft Auto Online, Jane scolds Andy for getting shot.
    Andy: What's wrong with us is that we're not invulnerable to bullets and the bullets went into us and made holes into us...
    Jane: Yeah, I'm hearing a lot of excuses, Andy, not a lot of solutions.
  • When Andy gets his superhero cape stuck in passing cars, Jane would rather pose for selfies.
• Not Hyperbole: The Outside Xtra video "This Palworld Ripoff Is Literally Unplayable" is not using the word "literally" in its figurative sense — the video consists of 6 minutes of all 5 hosts trying and failing to play the game beyond the main menu. They can't even select a save slot from the "New Game" or "Load Game" menus, but they do manage to successfully use the "Quit Game" function.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: In the 7 Alien Races That Look Like Beautiful Human Women by Amazing Coincidence video, Mike describes the Orions and adds "This isn't some fanfic written by a horny 13-year old, this is the real thing".
• Not So Above It All: While playing Among Us on the airship map, Ian and Wheels spent all the time joking about the ketchup and mustard bottles in the kitchen. Luke, as Ian's partner in chaos, is eager to go along...and the more serious minded Ellen, Jane, and Aoife all join in.
• Off the Rails: Discussed by guest presenter Johnny Chiodini, the Dicebreaker and dungeon master for the Oxbox crew's Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, in 7 Ways D&D Players Destroy Their DM's Plans. They use their experiences with the crew to describe each situation and means to avoid these situations.
• Off to Boarding School: In the Mario Golf fiction created for Ninji, Mike wonders why Ninji hasn't been shipped off to Military School. Luke reflects that he tried that already: Apparently, after Ninji presented himself for parade, the major-general was never the same.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Played with. While Jane can rattle off random science facts not covered by her master's in physics, she's often at a loss whenever Mike asks her something unrelated.
  • While playing Kerbal Space Program, after Mike's disastrous attempt:
    Mike: Go on then, Jane. With your degree in theoretical physics...
    Jane: It's got nothing to do with that; I just did the tutorial!
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: whenever Batman: Arkham City comes up, expect a reminder of how Jane once left Batman to die when playing as Catwoman.
  Jane: Just to see what would happen!
• One Head Taller: Not in a romantic sense, but there is a very noticeable height difference between Luke and Ellen, which tends to crop up in their videos.
• The Oner: Mike in "7 Surprising Ways Games Were Changed for Other Countries" has Mike go on a near-one-take rant to camera about the Crazy Castle series of games. The segment is notable for only have two breaks (both times it's footage interrupting Mike), but the great majority of the segment is Mike doing one long take to camera, and getting increasingly irritated at the name changes, confusing decisions of Kemco when localising the games and what licensed properties they were using in each region (at one point substituting Bugs Bunny for Ghost Busters of all things). As of writing, it holds the record for longest talking heads segment in an Outside Xbox list video (it lasts just under 3 and a half minutes!). For most of it, he also wears a pair of Nerd Glasses, to prove how serious he's being, and to make the audience aware of the wild ride of confusing information Mike is about to throw their way.
• One-Steve Limit: During livestreams with Dicebreaker, there is another Mike: Michael Whelan. He is frequently referred to as "Wheels" to avoid confusion.
• Oop North: In one Show of the Weekend, Ellen is tasked with coming up with voices for normally unvoiced animal characters in video games. When she reaches Senu, the hawk, Andy immediately interrupts and gives her this kind of accent. Ellen and Luke can barely control themselves.
• Organ Autonomy: "Eight Platforming Heroes Who Never Escaped the '90s" introduces a new Oxtra mascot, Mr. Wavy (a glove with googly eyes, worn by Ellen). It ends poorly.
• Orphaned Series: The Shenmue II Let's Play. Turns out the save got corrupted.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope:
  • During a video about the most untrustworthy people in video games, Mike remarks that he is so trustworthy, you can feel free to leave your bank details in the comments section of the video. Next on screen is the phrase "Do not give Mike Channell your bank details."
  • During a video describing the worst gaming peripherals to ever hit the market, Jane remarks that if she wanted to get electrocuted, she could stick a fork in a toaster and not spend 99 pounds to do it. The bottom of the screen displays: "Do not stick a fork in a toaster."
  • When Andy and Jane attempted to recreate a cocktail from a recipe they read in Dishonored 2^note The recipe is a classic Gin Sling, they read "ice, a handful, and nutmeg, fresh" as "a handful of nutmeg." A disclaimer at the bottom of the video claims "Spoiler: This is a dangerous amount of nutmeg. Like seriously, a dangerous amount. Do not eat this much nutmeg ever."
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Andy describes Parappa The Rapper as "definitely in my Top 3 Games About A Rapping Dog Of All Time".
• Overly Long Name: "7 Brave Franchises That Held Out Impressively Long Before Adding Grappling Hooks" comes off as this.
• Palette Swap: Invoked by Mike when Jane asks him to tag in his partner for Tekken Tag Tournament 2. He leaves the camera, and returns in a new T-shirt, declaring himself to be a palette-swapped character.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • In the Show of the Week for Tekken Tag Tournament 2. Andy mocks the disguise of "Violet" as obviously being Lee. Mike then shows up at the end of the show wearing a green wig calling himself "Verdent."
  • The "Eight Disguises That Aren't Fooling Anyone" video features several examples of video games using this trope. It's presented by "Leonardo Micstand (a person you've never seen before)", who is obviously Andy hiding behind a wig, a false nose, and a Line-of-Sight Name — at least until the end of the video, when the real Andy shows up and chases him away.
• Pass the Popcorn: Used a few times as a response to drama (in-game or out). At one point, Andy opts for some tea during "7 Games That Were Nearly Extremely Boring," while covering the clash between Apple and Microsoft over Bungie Software and the Halo IP. Jane also happily munches on popcorn during the Fear Academy games while Ellen is handling a scary game.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Andy in "8 Achievements That Took Serious Planning: Commenter Edition" admits that the username of commenter DJomnific3nt is "a wicked strong password if you're looking for one."
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: In one video, Ellen claims that she only started her career as a Youtuber due to a typo, and that actually all her training was as a yewcuber, which she explains is a person who cuts yew trees into wooden cubes.
• Person as Verb:
  • To "Ellen"^note The gerund form "Ellening" is also common. someone is to ask them a multiple choice question where the correct answer is not given as one of the choices.
  • To "Mike" is to undertake a stealth or otherwise non-action game with as much violence or action as possible. Going "Full Mike" means to approach a stealth mission in a manner with all the subtlety of a full-on gunship assault and with only slightly lower round count.
  • They appear to have started using "John Marston-ing" to describe the act of exploiting someone's desire to find/acquire something or someone else by promising you'll help them do if they just complete your (often increasingly pointless or unpleasant) busywork for you.
• Playful Otter: The "please stand by" caption page for the Outside Xtra livestreams feature pictures of a couple of friendly-looking otters.
  "Patience is a virtue", they seem to say.
  • They return for the outro, with the caption "Looks like these otters enjoyed the stream."
    • Ellen has also acquired an otter plushie as a quarantine stream mascot, which was promptly named Ottsio Ottertore.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: In the second Animal Crossing: New Horizons livestream, this is Andy's reaction to Luke going to his island in a purple bath towel and not much else. Luke puts up resistance to that request.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner:
  • Andy drops one during the Assault on Fort Mercer in Red Dead Redemption.
    Andy: [while on a Gatling gun] Do you suffer from lead deficiency? Allow me to...sort that out for you.
  • Luke drops one in Xtra's second episode of the Kingdom of Amalur Let's Play.
    Luke: All right brownies, Welcome to Hell. Population: you.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • During a Let's Play of Alien: Isolation
  Jane: Come on, this is for science, Mike.
  Mike: Sound-Effect Bleep Science!
  • During a show when Luke was forced to eat a Carolina Reaper-flavored jellybean.
  Andy: How are you feeling, Luke?
  Luke: I'm feeling bad, Andy, because I just ate a massively Sound-Effect Bleep-ing spicy jelly bean.
  • From the Mega Man entry in the "7 Upgraded Bosses Who Clearly Weren't Enough of a Jerk the First Time" video:
  Jane: I sure hope that when I invite [Bass] back to Dr. Light's lab for repairs, he doesn't go berserk and is then revealed to have actually been an invention of the evil Dr. Wily!
  (roll cutscene, showing precisely that thing happening)
  Jane: (with great deliberateness and Tranquil Fury) F**k.
• Product Placement:
  • Some videos about new games have "Sponsored Content" in the title.
  • Jane's astronaut training wasn't explicitly part of the promotional effort for Mass Effect: Andromeda, but the "Andromeda Initiative" patches on everyone's jumpsuits were a bit of a giveaway.
  • Discussed in the "7 Awkward Product Placements That Put You Off Said Product, Probably" video, discussing placements gone bad. They parody this by offering a strange product called Wondergel that tastes like cinnamon. They say it does everything, but it kills the plants and Andy faints when drinking it.
• Punny Name:
  • In their Red Dead Redemption Let's Plays, they refer to the protagonist's mount as "Horse-on Welles".
  • Jane's player handle in a number of games is "Miss Deeds."
  • The Poogie that roams around the hub level in Monster Hunter: World gets named Piggie Stardust in Oxtra's first Let's Play of the game, and subsequently renamed whenever the audience makes a suggestion Luke particularly likes, becoming John Ham and then Albert Einswine.
  • The fake-out end credits in the "Return to Arkham" episode of Show of the Week have a bunch of them, listing "Cameron Mann" as Second Unit Director, "Marion Nette" as a puppeteer, etc.
  • A friendly dog in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gets dubbed "Pawdon Ramsay".
  • According to "7 Skills We Can't Believe We Had to Unlock," Jane eats dinner using a knife named Slice Stallone and a fork named Arnold Forkzenegger.
    Andy: (offscreen) Who calls them that?
    Jane: Don't criticize me when I'm holding a knife, I told you.
  • For the streams of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Luke's island is "Knot Atoll", Andy's is "Michael Bay", Jane's is ''Isle Bebac", and Ellen's is "Den Isle".
  • Ellen has an otter plushie which acted as a mascot during her streams of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. It was promptly named Ottsio Ottertore.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: Luke has the personality down pat.
  • When noticing a jumbo jet sliding towards him (and later, when Mike mentions finding unexploded World War II ordnance while digging in his garden), Luke could only muster "This could be a problem."
  • When playing Soul Calibur VI at a preview event with Andy, he manages to get shoved out of the ring. His response: "I strongly dislike what happened just now." He then remarks he will send a sternly worded letter, and if that doesn't work, he'll "go nuclear", which is disdainful tutting.
  • During the Mario Golf fiction, Luke reflects that he's tried everything he can think of to get Ninji to behave. However, he refuses to try a hug, as there are some lines that can't be crossed.
• Rage Quit: Jane is supposedly prone to these. (Considering her reaction to slimes escaping and eating her other resources in Slime Rancher, it's unclear how much of this is a joke.)
  • From "7 Final Bosses You Got to Play As":
    Lord of the Rings: Conquest is a game of two halves. Much like football—or Monopoly, when I lose at Monopoly and rip the board in half.
  • From the commenter edition of "7 'Bad' Endings":
    Now, I could have sworn that the ending of Dark Souls is you Frisbee-ing the disk into a quarry after your four hundredth defeat to Ornstein and Smough. But apparently there is more game after that?
• Rapid-Fire "No!":
  • Jane's response to the spider from Limbo is just a series of "nope"s followed by leaving the room.
  • Luke created a quiz for Ellen in which he had a character don disguises in Animal Crossing and Ellen had to guess how that person could secretly be an assassin. When Luke dresses up like a patchy urchin with a pig snout, Ellen gets so creeped out she starts noping out, while Jon's character quietly flees the studio.
• A Rare Sentence: Andy had never heard the phrase "Jacuzzi emergency landing" prior to this video, while Mike had never used the phrase "maybe Brooker will have turned around and I'll have a clear shot at the testicles" prior to this one.
• Relax-o-Vision: During the live let's-play of Friday the 13th: The Game's single-player challenge mode, Andy, Jane and Mike find the Sex Signals Death cutscene in the "Packanack Party" level so disturbing on multiple levels that when they fail the level and have to retry, they cut the game feed during the cutscene and just show their horrified reactions (and Jane attempting to hum a relaxing tune). Not an entirely straight example, because the audience does get to see the full horror the first time around.
• Running Gag:
  • Almost every "Show of the Week" video ends with two of the cast-members deciding to go for lunch, only for something (of varying degrees of surreality) to intervene and prevent them from doing so.
  • While not as prevalent, there's an ongoing joke about the team's pronunciation of the word 'beta'^note They tend to pronounce it "bee tah" instead of "bay tah" as most Americans do. whenever an upcoming game's open beta starts.
  • Ellen's Outside Xbox fanfiction gets mentioned quite frequently.
  • "Show of the Week/Weekend" segments getting interrupted by an outside party, who asks what's going on, and gets a response along the lines of "Normal things!"
  • Whenever Andy goes outside the studio, he always ends up going insane.
  • The typical Lame Pun Reaction goes something like this:
  Person On-Screen:^note Often Ellen or Luke [Makes an pun]
  Person Off-Screen:^note Often Andy BOOOOOOO!
  Person On-Screen: [Responds, usually either by smirking, doubling down on the pun or protesting]
  Person Off-Screen: Boo.
  • Whenever someone mentions having an agent, it will always be Andy with a new piece accessory and some ridiculous name (usually Bud Fensler).
  • Andy (and occasionally Luke) responding to new or interesting developments with "Wellity, wellity, wellity."
    Jane (from the "Metacritic Worst Game Challenge" stream): It's a bit like Shakespeare, you know; you're doing Simpsons references all the time without realizing it, because it's so influential.
  • Any video involving a Batman game will contain one or more of: jokes about nobody realizing Batman and Bruce Wayne are the same man (usually involving a comment about them clearly having the same chin); lampshading of how badly gameplay stretches Batman's "no killing" rule; Andy rating the Arkham series version of the Riddler as Batman's least effective adversary ever.
  • LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is always rendered as "Leggle Marvos".
  • Ellen in real life quite likes Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, but the presenters of both shows tend to exaggerate this to absurd levels.
  • Mike's attempts at stealth in games inevitably devolving into explosions and murder. Both in and of itself and his habit of doing this being mentioned, to the point his name is used as a verb to describe this happening.
  • Whenever they stream Mario Party, Peach is a despot who must be kept poor at all costs, it's good luck to poison Monty Mole, and the whole game is midway between Game of Thrones and the Russian Revolution.
  • A stream for Quiplash 3 with Dicebreaker and Eurogamer contains answers such as someone claiming to be Jane to get votes, "Tall Vampire Lady", and "Cook Hot Meat".
  • "7 WTF Enemies Who Wandered in From a Different Genre" includes calls to Shigeru Miyamoto, including in unexpected times.invoked
  • "What the Hell Just Happened: How Well Do You Know 2023?" gets a lot of mileage out of cutting to Asterion from Baldur's Gate III saying "I don't mean sex, to be clear."
• Sanity Slippage:
  • The Spelunky 2 livestream may have broken Luke.
    "Mhm, mhm, mhm, mmkay, okay, okay— 'Do you need to take a break, Luke?' says [a viewer in chat]. No. Take a break? Do people think I need to take a break? I don't think so. I don't think anyone's saying that. Let's buy more bombs."
  • It happened again when Luke played Barista Simulator: despite Ellen's attempts to keep him grounded, he went from tidying up and picking out a shop name, to fighting customers with a baseball bat and shutting the shop down to sleep for several days straight.
• Saying Too Much:
  • Luke admits that he and Mike celebrate Christmas starting in November. This leads Ellen to remark that she got their admission on tape, causing Andy and Cameraman John to haul them off to Christmas Jail until December, when one can finally start celebrating Christmas.
  • After nearly six years of Not Telling Luke, Ellen lets it slip that she visited Legoland without him.^note They had already joked about it during a let's-play of Geoguessr.
• Scenery Porn: The first Let's Play Hokkaido video has both Andy and Jane take a brief holiday in 47's suite, not leaving their starting point for what appears to be a good couple of minutes. Andy immediately notices the view, and Jane is simply in awe of the mountain view the room looks over.
• Screaming at Squick: Neither Andy nor Mike takes Who Will Get The Girl? at all well.
  Mike: MY EYES!
• Self-Deprecation: To wit, this makes a huge portion of their humour. They know they're not skilled players and have no problem lampooning that fact. For example:
  • To celebrate reaching one million subscribers, they made a video titled "11 Times We Were Just the Worst at Stealth" which showed highlights of their long history of being bad at being sneaky (mostly Mike or under the advice of Mike).
  • At the start of 2016, they looked back at their epic fails in 2015. There were quite a number of them.
  • And again for 2017.
  • Jane does it when discussing the opening werewolf fight from Bloodborne in "7 Games That Tried To Kill You Immediately, Part 2":
  Jane: But if you're good enough at Bloodborne, you can instead beat this werewolf to death with your bare fists and just carry on about your business. (cut to a clip of Jane being killed by the werewolf, then back to Jane) And that's where a clip of that happening would have gone if I'd ever been able to do it.
• Serial Killer: Andy's version of Agent 47 falls into this during the Colorado mission in Hitman (2016), starting by taking a mannequin arm as a trophy and culminating in completing an assassination while dressed as a scarecrow. In a subsequent mission, he adopts a costume based on Ghostface from Scream.
• Serious Business:
  • Playing Mouse Trap. That is, the 1980s children's board game Mouse Trap.
  • Space Buddies in Among Us, when you stick with your buddy no matter what. It doesn't matter if they're a murdering shapeshifting impostor.
    Andy: I'll die before I turn on my Space Buddy.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The crews' method of explaining all the adult jokes in the "7 Joke We Didn't Get Until Much Later" video and it's inevitable "Commenter Edition" was by explaining the jokes in a roundabout way that, surprisingly, makes none of them use any profanities or naming the actual...acts on camera.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Invoked with "Sniper Luigi", their play on Luigi's role in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle as the sniper, who in their reckoning becomes a traumatised, dead-eyed veteran of an endless war against the Rabbids who knows nothing but cold, remorseless death delivered from a distance.
  Luke: He doesn't feel anything, not any more. The first 100 times, sure, but not now.
• Shipper on Deck: Jane, in particular, is very invested in 47 and Diana.
• Shout-Out:
  • While discussing the bad ending of Banjo-Kazooie, Luke comments that the rejuvenated Gruntilda looks like Posh Spice and starts throwing out puns based on Spice Girls lyrics.
  • During a livestream Q&A, the team is asked how they got together, and Andy claims that Samuel L. Jackson showed up in each of their houses in the middle of the night to recruit them.
  • While playing as an ape in Crisis on the Planet of the Apes, Luke tells a human to take her stinking hands off an ape, and sings King Louie's song from The Jungle Book (1967).
  • Oxbox actually receive one of these in Hitman 2 in the game's Miami level, where eagle-eyed players can spot a whiteboard that lists Mike, Jane and Andy - and possible Mike's explosive duck too. The whiteboard in question can be seen here
  • Luke's meltdown upon meeting the Skyrim frost troll yet again paraphrased a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest.
    Hell is empty and all the demons are here!
  • When playing Far Cry 5, Luke and Andy sing "Cheeseburger In Paradise", en route to rescuing Cheeseburger the bear.
  • In a Let's Play Of Tropico 6, Jane is the president and declares "All shall love me and despair," a line associated with Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings.
  • Ellen and the stream chat name the cat from Stray "Jonesy" after the cat from Alien. Given that the main character of the film is also called Ellen, and both cats are ginger, it works very well.
• Simpleton Voice: In the "Detective Pikachu's Murder Mystery Challenge" episode of Show of the Weekend, Ellen gives Trico this kind of voice.
• Single-Issue Wonk: Luke is generally quite laidback and relaxed about things, but he can get very intense on the subject of dinosaurs and the accurate depiction thereof (he's particularly concerned that theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor be depicted with the feathers that contemporary science indicates they should have), much to the exasperation of his much-less-concerned-about-accurate-dinosaurs workmates.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: While the cast keep any real life romantic entanglements quiet, it is quite notable that Token Evil Teammate Jane always chooses the most sweet and wholesome video game boyfriends possible. Alistair, Kaidan and Jacob are three of her favorite romance options.
• Skewed Priorities: Jane and Luke are big fans of Life Is Strange and, in particular, the character of Chloe. This leads to one video wherein the main character, Max, is vocally condemned because she gets a bit flaky about responding to Chloe's text messages. Which is fair enough by itself, no one likes being blanked after all, but can lead to some eyebrows being raised considering that in this same video, both of the people condemning Max for this reveal calmly that they are perfectly happy to choose the game ending where the entire town is destroyed and hundreds of people are killed simply because it means that Chloe is okay and some of those people were mean to her anyway.
• Something Only They Would Say: During a trivia livestream where the goal is to guess who drew a picture, Mike immediately guesses that Andy drew a chainsaw, because the person wielding screamed "Groovy!" as a Shout-Out to Evil Dead's Ash Williams. And he was right.
• Sound-Effect Bleep:
  • During one "Show of the Weekend" episode, they bleep out all of the components in a puzzle in Thimbleweed Park that Andy is explaining, as the game had been recently released and he wanted to avoid spoiling the puzzle's solution.
  • Another video has them joke that if they let James speak, they have to pay him more.
    James: Hey! I-[BLEEEEEP]
    Mike: Ha, nice try. We'll just bleep all of that.
    James: [longer BLEEEEEEP while Mike and Andy look disturbed]
    Andy: Well. We're definitely going to have to bleep that.
• Southern Belle: Evangeline Green^note (Ellen), who supposedly dubs over Andy's lines for the American localisation of Oxbox videos. (Sadly, this joke has only been used once so far, but the accent does pop up in a couple episodes of Show of the Weekend.)
• Spiders Are Scary: They certainly are to Ellen, who has arachnophobia. Luke once showed her footage of different video game spiders to scientifically ascertain how scary she found them, and she has been known to go Screw This, I'm Out of Here! when facing really big spiders like that one in Resident Evil 2.
• Spit Take:
  • Invoked when Andy asks Mike to tell him about For Honor while he drinks a glass of water, noting that he gets upset with historical inaccuracy.
  • Invoked in the OX Supporters Club announcement video:
    Mike: We've been [making videos] for bloody ages. Let me just take a sip of water while Jane tells you exactly how long.
    Jane: Ten years!
    Mike: [spits out water]
• Squee:
  • Ellen's reaction to Mike's description of the Palicoes in Monster Hunter: World, and to pretty much anything involving the Poogie in the same game.
  • Ellen, again, pretty much continually while playing Moss.
  • Luke isn't immune, as we learned from one of the Breath of the Wild streams.
    (Link meets Kheel, one of Kass and Amali's chicks)
    Ellen and Luke: Awww!
    Ellen: Oh my God! (unintelligible)
    Luke: Ellen, it's like you in a bird form!
• Standard Snippet: Spoofed in one Hitman (2016) stream wherein they visit a resort in the Maldives. As Agent 47 runs around the island, Andy and Luke sing stereotypically "tropical" marimba music; later, when 47 acquires the disguise of a grizzled sea captain, the two effortlessly switch over to tooting out a Popeye-esque sea shanty.
• The Stinger: Episodes of "Show of the Week" end with one. Usually two of the hosts attempt to go out for lunch, but fail to for various reasons.
• Stocking Filler: Ellen frequently wears black stockings and a skirt.
• The Stoic:
  • Mike has been mentioned to be nearly robotic when it comes to jump scares and other moments in horror games as opposed to frequently-scared Andy or Ellen. During a Let's Play of PT, a jump scare caused Jane and Andy to nearly jump out of their seats, while Mike, unflinching, just turned towards them and smirked.
  • Luke was this when venturing through a word of weirdness in Far Cry 5's Arcade Edition map, invoking floating clocks, spooky goats, and architecture shaped like tongues.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: This sometimes crops up in Jackbox games (which require the players to respond individually to specific questions/prompts). A couple of examples include Luke and Ellen separately suggesting getting sealed in the walls of a house, or Luke and Jane independently inventing denim paint. It also happens in RiffTrax, when multiple players will use some variation of powdering my breasts as a joke.
• Stupid Sexy Flanders: In this video on 8 Alternate Costumes with Serious Explaining to Do, Andy brings up the Batman Beyond skin from the Arkham Knight games. He points out the rear of Bats is really distracting in that costume, and then does a Gag Sub of Bruce saying "Nothing at all!" three times, which then cuts to Andy squicked out and says:
  Andy: GaaAaAhHh, Stupid Sexy Batman!
• Stylistic Suck: Show of the Week has a polished animated opening sequence. Show of the Weekend, on the other hand, has to make do with the title written in black marker on a notepad with Luke (badly) singing along to a ukelele.
  • In the "7 Parties You Don't Want an Invite To" commenter follow-up video, the whole crew (minus Andy) give a terrible rendition of "Wonderwall." Ellen really leans into it, though.^note For reference, this is her normal singing voice.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • Their liveshow at EGX 2017 opened with a voice that is clearly Andy insisting that they "definitely have their own announcer so stop asking".
  • The "Eight Disguises That Aren't Fooling Anyone" video is presented by a mysterious person who looks just like Andy wearing a wig and a false nose, who makes several comments along the lines of "That's an even worse disguise than the one that I would be wearing if I were wearing a disguise, which I'm not".
  • One episode of Show of the Weekend has Ellen accidentally shoot Andy with a VR aim controller. After hiding his body behind the purple sofa, Luke delivers the opening lyrics of the show with some twists.
    Luke: Show of the Weekend, everything is cool. Show of the Weekend, we didn't kill Andy.
    Ellen: Play the thing!^note Referring to the opening
  • After a commenter jokes about Andy playing as if Mike were the one at the controls:
    Mike: Don't be ridiculous, Andy! How would I even go about constructing a voodoo doll that would allow me to remote control you? I mean, where would I find the scraps of clothing and bits of hair required to complete the ritual?
    Andy: ...that's pretty specific.
  • Mike's sure that he's never mentioned his love of Dark Souls on the Outside Xtra channel, or the Outside Xbox channel, or just to bored family members over dinner.
  • The re-release of Kingdoms of Amalur for the Xbox One was not easy on Ellen.
    Luke: ...Hang on, are those the same clothes that you were wearing last week?
    Ellen: (stammers) I've been home. I've bathed! Did Mike tell you otherwise? 'Cause he's a goddamn liar.
  • In the list video "7 Acronyms So Painful They Need an Ice Pack: Commenter Edition", Luke accidentally reveals that he might not be what he seems:
    Luke: When a breed of sinister robots is killing people and taking their places, your primary concerns should be: 1) What kick-ass name can we give the anti-robot taskforce and 2) Does anyone realize that I'm one of those robots? Wait, I've said too much...
    [later]
    Luke: After all, who could possibly hope to get anything straightened out by an organization whose name stands for "Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger", which is exactly the kind of pitiful human word garbage that I, as a regular human, have no problem with.
  • Show of the Week for 14 December 2012:
    Jane: Welcome to Show of the Week, which is definitely a real show about video games, and not a money laundering operation for illegal backstreet gambling.
    Mike: That was unusually specific.
    Jane: And you'll stay out of it if you know what's good for you.
• The Swear Jar: OX has jars for referencing Aliens: Colonial Marines, getting "Lost in The Outsider's eyes", making Dark Souls comparisons, and engaging in "Video Game Journalism Clichés" (such as, well, making Dark Souls comparisons).
• Take Over the World: This appears to be Jane's long-term objective. How playing Mass Effect plays into this is left as an exercise for the reader.
• Take That!:
  • Aliens: Colonial Marines is the team's favorite punching bag.
  • Ellen takes a couple of swipes at the Homefront games in one video, but elsewhere they're Beneath Notice.
  • The general theme in "7 Irritating Problems Video Games Suddenly Have Now", which takes potshots at Temporary Online Content (which leads to Ellen making some truly awful Sean Bean puns), the prevalence of Lootboxes in games that are as unreliable as they are rewarding, and having multiple editions for the same game that causes confusion and requires a spreadsheet to make sense of, among other things.
  • In "7 WTF Bosses Who Have Some Explaining to Do," the Morgan Freeman boss fight in South Park: The Fractured But Whole leads Andy to an uncomfortable realization.
    Andy: In the South Park universe, Morgan Freeman's acting career has hit the skids—unlike in real life, where he's starring in the upcoming (checks notes) third movie in the Olympus Has Fallen series, Angel Has Fallen. (Aside Glance)
  • Their reaction stream of the 2021 Xbox E3 showcase had unwanted Arabic subtitles. Jane didn't want to fiddle with settings during a trailer for an exciting game, so she had a try during the Fallout 76 update announcement.
  • In the "7 Effed-Up Secret Levels" video, Luke sarcastically uses "Satire!" to describe some of the dumber aspects of the Grand Theft Auto series. (Or its trippier aspects, as in the case of the giant statue with a beating heart from GTA 4.)
  • Whenever The Simpsons games come up it's always made clear there no love for anything past Season 10.
• Talking with Signs: During 7 Unskippable Openings You Never Want to Play Through Again, when discussing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Luke was reenacting the spoken lines of the opening while his actual lines are on a clipboard. He asks to be slapped out of it, and Ellen obliges.
• Technobabble: In "7 Times a Game Was So Meta It Freaked You Out: The Return", Luke appends the entry for Psychonauts with various gaming colloquialisms' that sound like this; Looter Shooter^note You shoot enemies and get weapons from their corpses, which you them upgrade in specific stations, Easter Egg^note A hidden secret in a videogame put there by the developers, Camping ^note Staying in one spot and shooting enemies when and if they appear, Nerf^note When a weapon or skill gets altered to be less powerful for balance purposes, Rogue-like and Rogue-lite^note Both genres of videogames that have some aspect of perma-death in them, and Cheese^note To use a very unpopular and unfair strategy to complete a task really easily.
• Tempting Fate:
  • If you were to pick any one of their Let's Plays at random, start playing it, and hold your breath, you wouldn't have to wait very long before one of the crew confidently declares how well everything seems to be going mere moments before everything goes completely to pot. Almost guaranteed to happen if the one playing is Mike.
  • In the "7 Famous Movie Moments Ruined by the Game Adaptation", Andy cheerfully remarks that since movies and video games are two great things, putting them together should go well, and "what could be the worst that could happen." Immediately, a picture of Aliens: Colonial Marines is displayed.
    Andy: [indignant] You get that out of here!
  • While playing a game of Mario Party, Luke lands on a Bad Luck space literally one space before the star, and remarks that if he gets the result where the Star space moves, he will murder everyone in the bar they're playing at. No prizes for guessing his result.
  • During an Among Us playthrough using the proximity chat feature, Luke jokingly suggests bunching up together, so the Impostor could get a stack kill. Then it happens.^note Andy did it
  • During a challenge in which the crew must spin a wheel and determine which spicy jellybean to eat, Luke hopes he doesn't get the Carolina Reaper. Predict what he gets.
  • When Mike covers the game Red Ocean on the video for The 7 Silliest Character Names in Videogames (That We're Meant to Take Seriously), which features main character Jack Hard.
    Mike: We'd say that the chances of us ever seeing a sequel are extremely slim, which means we'll never know what Jack Hard is up to these days. And no, we're not going to speculate. Honestly.
    [Beat]
    Andy: [off-screen] ... probably jackin' it.
    Mike: [facepalm]
• The Tetris Effect:
  • At one point, Mike loses the ability to distinguish between reality and Peggle 2.
  • Ellen plays so many Lego games that she becomes temporarily convinced she's a minifigure.
  • Jane gets so addicted to the balloon hide-and-seek feature of Super Mario Odyssey she steals the balloons at a birthday party. She wasn't sure whose birthday it was, but from the balloons, she thinks they were five years old.
• That Came Out Wrong: On "Show of the Weekend" for 26 January 2019, Mike and Luke are talking about decluttering, and the idea that one should get rid of everything that does not "spark joy." Mike is not keen.
  Mike: Every single bit of my junk sparks joy.

Then he remembers the slang meaning of "junk."

• That's All, Folks!: List features end with this. One of the hosts thanks the viewer for watching, encourages them to like the video and subscribe to the channel, and then rambles to encourage the viewer to watch more videos.
• Thermometer Gag: Used for a quick joke in the "Untitled Goose Game" episode of SOTW, after Ellen puts a whiteboard marker in her goose puppet's mouth. Luke points out that real birds might not cooperate with getting their temperature taken at that end... then scolds Ellen for laughing.
• Tinfoil Hat:
  • When Super Mario Odyssey was released, Luke covers his hat in tinfoil to prevent Mario from possessing him^note In the game proper, the fact that he was wearing a hat at all would've made him safe.. Ellen thinks he is paranoid, but then a Mario-hat wearing Andy comes over, talking like Mario and asks which one of them would like to give him their brain. Ellen immediately steals the hat from Luke's head.
  • During an episode about Far Cry 5, Luke is making a tinfoil hat because he's convinced the developers stole his idea to make Cheeseburger the bear. Ellen simply sighs and takes only mild notice, clearly learning her lesson from the last time.
• Token Evil Teammate: Jane.
• Touché: Ellen in the video "7 Ridiculously Expensive Games for When You Win the Lottery" which talks about ludicrously expensive games. She name drops the "Saints Row IV: Super Dangerous Wad Wad Edition", which cost a million dollars, and gave you a copy of the game, a Toyota Prius, a Lamborghini Gallardo, plastic surgery, and too many other things to list here. She points out that nobody bought it and it was basically made to drum up publicity for the game... which she fell for by talking about it in the video. She promptly offers a "well played" to the developers.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Luke's The Evil Within 2-inspired choose-your-own-adventure "labyrinth of unhappiness" ends with the surprise revelation that Ellen was playing as "Milk Penguin", a white-fluid covered bird that appears in the trailer (and which Luke insists is a penguin, despite everyone else telling him it's a crow). When Ellen reacts with indignant incredulity to this revelation, a montage of clips is shown that demonstrate that the revelation actually was foreshadowed quite carefully throughout the story^note her character blundered clumsily towards a house with 'large feet catching on the grass' despite Ellen being quite small and petite; her character barely reacts to a drastic plunge in temperature; her character has problems opening a doorknob; her character escapes from a haunted factory by sliding out on her belly; and despite being several miles away, her character is able to instantly tell that a distant factory is some kind of cannery or fish-processing plant, presumably because her character is attracted to the smell of fish.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Jane's libation of choice is gin.
  • Luke really likes macaroons. His love of them got him trapped in the office over Christmas.
  • More than once, Andy has mentioned a love of barbecue, and said if he ever got magic powers, he would have the power to make perfect barbecue.
• Trap Door:
  • Andy had set one up in celebration of the 25th anniversary edition of Night Trap. Instead of catching Jane, he catches James.
  • Jane has one that she uses to launch Andy out of a window.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Ellen and Luke discuss this in a video about scariest spiders in a video game, as Ellen has arachnophobia. Some of the ones she's asked to review are actually not all that scary, such as Video Game/Minecraft, Dark Souls, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons because the spiders are so unrealistic looking that the concept of the spider is scarier than what she sees. This is in contrast to the more realistic scuttling and photorealistic spiders of Arachnogohma in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and the Black Tiger of the Resident Evil remake, whose motions fill her with dread.
• Understatement: Luke has a knack for this.
  • In Grand Theft Auto Online he describes a plane falling towards his character with a surprisingly calm "This could be a problem."
  • In his Bloodborne livestream, he sees a matted, feral, vicious-looking werewolf emerging from a pool of blood and describes it as "not ideal."
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: Played for laughs; Andy can get quite competitive whenever the crew are pitted against each other, and can indulge in a bit of gloating if he comes out on top. Such as in "Ellen's Big SNES Decision", when she eventually chooses his suggestion for which game she'd play first on the SNES Mini if she happened to acquire one^note Super Mario World, for what it's worth:
  Andy: YES!!! I am the best at... liking SNES games.
  • Ellen's victory at "Wimbledungeons" (a tabletop-game tennis simulator) was also... less than dignified.
• Verbal Backspace: Jane isn't impressed by the masks in We Happy Few, because she's worn creepier - seen creepier.
• The Voice: James can be heard in the videos every so often. They "revealed" his face in the 2 Million Subscribers video, though he had appeared on camera before- most notably in his own State of Decay Let's Play series.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Mike is physically disgusted by the Great Mighty Poo, to the point that he has to vomit into a bucket.
• Voodoo Doll: In one Show of the Week, Mike makes a voodoo doll of Andy (out of an action figure) so he can remotely control Andy to play a game when he's not able to attend a video session in person. The bit ends with him clumsily dropping the doll, and Andy suffering an Offscreen Crash.
• Wardrobe Malfunction: When Ellen was doing a stream of Cyberpunk 2077, a size mismatch between character model and clothing caused the model's breasts to clip through its clothes. Corpsing ensued.
• Waxing Lyrical:
  • In the "7 Times a Game Over was More Fun than Winning" video, Luke starts quoting Spice Girls after observing that the villain in the game he's discussing looks like Posh Spice.
  • Later in the same video, Ellen quotes Spandau Ballet.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: Occasionally, one of the crew will go off on a rant that gets interrupted by a test pattern, only cutting back once they've gotten it out of their system. In "7 Superheroes Betrayed by Their Own Crappy Game," for example, Ellen is not a fan of the Daredevil movie.
  • When Jane gets going in the "Titanfall Drinking Game" episode, it cuts away to a Stick of Truth-style Relax-o-Vision screen, apologizing for her swearing "like a sailor with his hornpipe caught in the ship's wheel."
  • When Ellen's trip to Legoland finally came to light, Luke walked out of the studio in shock, and the episode briefly cut to this message:
    After some quiet time alone and then an altercation where Jon wrestled Luke's finger away from the "Delete Channel" button, Luke was gently encouraged to return to the studio.
  • Then, of course, there's what happens whenever Amalur is mentioned around Ellen.
    Outside Xtra: (in a pinned comment under the "7 Disastrous Games" video) No, even with Re-Reckoning out, Ellen is still not over the whole Kingdoms of Amalur thing... THERE WAS A NEARLY FINISHED MMO, PEOPLE, NO STOP DRAGGING ME AWAY FROM THE KEYBOA-
• What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?: Mike offers two statements about himself: One is true, and the other is a lie. The statements are that he once played the Dentist in Little Shop of Horrors, or that he once played Jean Valjean and hasn't told Luke about it. Luke's reaction:
  Luke: Well, it better bloody be the dentist!
  Andy: Because if it isn't...
  Jane: Friendship over!
  Andy: You're getting a Jean Valjean sized ass whooping.
  Luke: Everything is on the line.
  Jane: There is an amnesty for playing Jean Valjean but you have to say it now.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: A Pet-Peeve Trope for the cast is when actors in games do shoddy accents, especially Fake Brits. Makes sense, since they're actually English themselves.
  • Ironically, they're not above doing this themselves, as Ellen proves when she tries to give Dogmeat from Fallout 76 a Boston accent.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
  • Jane and Ellen are terrified of spiders and arachnids in general. Ellen, in particular, won't even play a game if it features spider enemies and is holding off on playing the console version of Skyrim until she can mod the many many spiders into something she isn't scared of. So of course Ellen is the one who has to rate video-game spiders and let the viewers know how scary she finds them.
  • In this video, Jane's entire contribution to the segment about the spider from Limbo is just a stream of "nope" before leaving her seat.
  • At one point Xtra got an entire video out of Ellen rating various videogame spiders from "creepy but endurable" to "refusing to look at the screen".
  • While discussing Prey (2017) she remarks it was less creepy when four Mimics split up rather than having one, just because the extra legs made it look like a spider.
  • And in this video, on learning that the final boss that the video is discussing is the giant spider/scorpion from Devil May Cry Ellen nopes out of there as quickly as possible and has to be replaced by Andy.
  • Ellen hates horror and suspense in general. So she's the one who has to play a horror game each Halloween while one of her co-hosts watches along to provide commentary and moral support.
• With Catlike Tread:
  • Seems to be Mike's approach to stealth games. Often results in either Spanner in the Works or Leeroy Jenkins.
  Mike: (on Hitman (2016), a game that penalizes you every time you kill someone other than the 2-4 targets) Now, unfortunately, I've not been allowed to bring a gun, which is going to make it extremely difficult to kill my usual nineteen people...
  • Pointing this out has essentially become a Running Gag, both by himself and by everyone else, with even some descriptions calling him such things as a 'whirling tornado of clumsy murder'.
• World of Weirdness: The Show of the Week/End videos have essentially ended up here due to the Rule of Funny. Andy has become a vampire, a sentient planet, and gone insane everytime he leaves the studio; Mike a zombie (both temporarily), and was once raffled off to a fan; the studio has been attacked by aliens and malevolent wigs, and the studio has changed locations to be inside of a volcano, in a secret underwater lair, and in the middle of an Ancient Roman battlefield; and Luke and Ellen used a Pikachu toy with the power of time travel to retroactively attend a Nintendo Switch event.
• Would Hurt a Child: Jane at least would allow a child to get hurt and possibly die (in a video game, that is). In Sherlock Holmes: The Devil's Daughter, she's curious to see what happens when Wiggins, one of the Baker Street Irregulars, stays inside a chimney while suffocating and again when he deliberately loses his balance on top of a narrow piece of wood across rooftops.
• You Fool!: During a game of Among Us, Ellen gives one when the group votes to eliminate her.
  Ellen: YOU FOOLS! YOU ABSOLUTE FOOLS!^note She was right
• You Have Failed Me: One possible outcome whenever Jane plays a management game. During an Evil Genius 2 livestream, for example, she requested likes from the viewers, with "overling" Andy monitoring them...
  Jane: Did you? We'll know if you didn't.
  Andy: You're going in The Pit if you didn't.
• Your Mom: When Jane finishes a heavily-censored Cluster F-Bomb in "Show of the Week: The Titanfall Drinking Game", she pulls this on Mike:
  Mike: Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
  Jane: I kiss your mother with this mouth!

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So, lunch?
Yeah sure, I'll be right behind you...just gotta finish... reading the article...
...you're still reading the page Andy...
...mhm...you know, go on ahead without me Jane...I could be here a while.

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