Gore in video games is nothing new: It’s been around ever since the first splattered frog in Frogger, the first bloody fist in Final Fight, the first exploding inmate/gameshow contestant in Smash TV... But no matter how many years go by, developers keep finding new ways to make gorey games more visceral, more bloody, and more controversial than ever before. Dead Space Extraction, for instance, sets a new standard for gore on the Nintendo Wii, following in the footsteps of the original Dead Space (last year’s critically acclaimed space thriller/shooter/pants crapping simulator).

Yep, pretty gross.

Looking back on all our years of gaming, there are so many titles that made huge contributions to the splatterhouse genre of gaming. Here are some of our favorites:

Gears of War

That alien is like an egg filled with rasberry jelly.

There are lots of shooters out there where you play as a grizzled space marine tasked with fighting off hordes of hostile aliens/demons/whatever. But there’s only one in which you do so with an assault rifle with a chainsaw attached to it, that you use to slowly and gruesomely saw your way through the abdomens of your opponents. Additionally, you can “curb stomp” enemies while they’re down, which amounts to crushing their heads under heavy, bloodstained boots. In the sequel, you get swallowed by this giant nasty worm thing, which you must kill from the inside by destroying its many hearts. This results in you damn near drowning in blood. Literally. Awesome!

Honorable Mention: God of War

No More Heroes

Right down the middle. Great job!

No More Heroes is more or less a video game re-enactment of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s batshit crazy acid-spaghetti western “El Topo”. It’s also exceedingly gory. Every enemy that you encounter is destined to end up as a blood fountain, shooting geysers of red gravy up into the air is if their hearts had been replaced with industrial-grade air compressors. All you really do in this game is hunt down higher ranked assassins, cut your way through their henchmen with your “beam katana”, face off against and finally execute them. However, the game is actually quite funny and stylish despite the grim subject matter.

Honorable mention: Madworld