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It's hard not to expect a high level of violence in a game that's based on a comic book character soaked in more blood than a Scottish dinner recipe. This game, however, took that expectation and shoved it face first into a wood chipper. The game loosely based on the film gives a hard edge to the meaning of hard-edged. Players play as the well-armed hero as he tries to take down the entire New York crime syndicate by blowing a giant hole in anyway who gets in his way. The bloodiest features of the game are the interrogations. Players can use any number of background objects from a jigsaw to an industrial strength ceiling fan to a tank of piranha to get the goons to spill their guts before the player gets bored and decides to do it for them.

This fun but frustrating "Dawn of the Dead" rip-off lets players rip off just about every conceivable part of the human anatomy in new and interesting ways. The most telling feature about this zombie smash'em up is the fact that guns are the least useful weapons in the game. Ash had his chainsaw. Dirty Harry has his magnum. Frank had his bench.Players run around a huge mall infested with the walking dead shoplifting items from stores and finding new ways to void their warranties by turning them on the zombie horde. By far, the goriest weapon in the bunch is the post-hole digger that impales the zombie on the spinning drill bit and twirls its lifeless body around knocking its zombie brethren to the cold, hard ground. You'll find it in, of course, the hardware store, which as author Max Brooks taught us is the first place you should go at the start of a zombie attack. If you don't know who Max Brooks is or what I'm referring to, please stay away from me during the apocalypse.

This infamous underground shoot'em up flies in the face of every hardcore anti-video game safety guy who ever thought he or she was saving humanity by making strangers sign petitions for their local congressman to throw away or use as a coaster before throwing it away. It doesn't just let the player shoot innocent people. It also lets them shoot innocent people by using an innocent cat as a silencer...smash innocent people in the face with a shovel and dislodge their innocent head from its innocent spine...pour gasoline on innocent people and innocently light them on fire...and infect innocent people with anthrax by tossing an exploding cow's head at their innocent feet. Then after you enter your name, the game begins.

Any game about the horror of war should be violent. War is hell. Anyone who rallies against video games and claims titles like "Call of Duty" and "Command and Conquer" should be less violent are contributing to the desensitization of the threat and dangers of real war. "Gears of War 2" has the opposite effect. It makes the real thing look like a summer vacation in the Bahamas. The addition of new messy short range weapons and the ability to perform a number of very in-your-face finishing moves gives the game more blood, more skull cracking and more violent. And all this from a game whose predecessor let you chainsaw someone from their neck to their feet while they were still alive.

Rockstar Games isn't the company that shies away from controversy. Rather, they crave it. They need it. They want it. They are so notorious for creating brilliantly violent and gory games that Jack Thompson had his finger on the red button when the company announced they were producing a physics realistic "Table Tennis" game. The original "Manhunt," however, is definitely the bloodiest, and that's saying a lot for a company that created a game that lets you carjack people, then chase the fleeing driver down and run them over with their own car. The player convicted killer James Earl Cash, a man saved from death row by a sadistic director. Cash uses everything from plastic bags to crowbars to chainsaws to slice, crush, choke, disembowel and sever major arteries by sneaking up behind them. The most brutal kill features Cash sneaking up on someone with a baseball bat, choking them unconscious until they fall to their knees and hitting them in the head and smashing their skull clean off of its neck like some twisted, sadistic game of T-ball.

Despite its time, the original Playstation didn't have a lot of very violent games. It had some arcade titles that transferred a few pints of B-negative to home consoles, but not many original ones. All you have to do is look to the games that didn't make it to the console to understand why. "Thrill Kill" was supposed to be a four on four fighting game set in the pits of Hell, but was pulled at the last minute when testers thought the game actually came from there. Four players square off in a mind's eye view of what their character believes to be Hell for a fight to the death, which is redundant since they're already in Hell. Everything about the game is violent from the game play to the characters themselves. Players can choose a redneck cannibal called Cleetus who came to Hell after he died from a parasitic tapeworm he contracted while eating someone's leg. They can pick "The Imp," a violent midget government employee with a Napoleon complex who fights his enemies on stilts. They can even pick the Tormentor, a chain-wielding judge who would dismiss cases against serial killers so he could exact his own form of bloody justice with his own gavel stained hands. He must be from Texas.

Some games can justify their bloody content with a good story, rewards or the illusion of self-defense. This 8-bit horror style thriller has none of these, which makes us wonder what the hell Jack Thompson was doing in the mid 80's instead of protesting and filing legal petitions to ban a game in the early 2000's that no one had even played yet. "Chiller" is a shooting gallery game that lets players mutilate innocent people in a dungeon that looks like Rob Zombie's guest bedroom and awards them points for doing so for absolutely no reason. There isn't a story to set up the carnage or a reason naked, middle-aged white people are having their heads squashed in an apple press or their guts torn out on the rack. You just have to accept it. In that sense, the game is probably the most philosophical game of its time.

Now whereas "Chiller" doesn't offer any clear motive for your violent actions, "Carmaeggdon" actually justified their carnage. You get points! Taking a page from "Death Race 2000" or ripping it off from cover to cover depending on your point of view, "Carmaggedon" was a late-90s PC racing game that let players either finish the race in the fastest amount of time or destroy their competition and be the only left standing while running over a crowd of fleeing pedestrians along the way. You could drive a souped-up race car, a monster truck, a drag racer and even a huge dump truck. Ironically, there was no ambulance.

This coin-op from the makers of the original "Smash TV" won't just make you sick from the gaping chest wounds and flying limbs. The unrelenting U.S. patriotism will also make you want to vomit. Even the makers of "Painful Bloody Blood Lust 4: The Thirst for Bloody, Bloody Baby's Blood" thinks that this has too much blood. This revamped "Smash TV" hybrid ramped up with more testosterone than a Spanish bull hit arcades in the 90's and gave young ones the blood lust fix they had been craving for but couldn't get until video game companies could trick their parents into buying a console for them to prove their love. Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem have to stop a middle-eastern dictator, General Ahkboob, from poisoning America's baby formula supply and killing embedded reporters. The game featured more explosions and fireballs than a Bruckheimer movie that's short on script and plot (any of them) and ironically enough, the brunt of the violence on the game's heroes. You could die from electrocution, being set on fire and left to burn until your flesh turns to ashes or getting a giant hole blown through your torso. You could also die in the arcade version if it tipped over and fell on top of you. But if it does, than you deserve to die because that is not an accident. That's evolution.

Harvester: from the makers of "Painful Bloody Blood Lust 4:The Thirst for Bloody, Bloody Baby's Blood." Calling "Harvester" a violent game would be like calling Jack Thompson a pompous arrogant, know-it-all who abuses his authority to promote a philosophy that he knows what's best for everyone and doesn't deserve to lick a footprint off the sidewalk for sustenance. It's nothing they haven't heard before. "Harvester" took no prisoners with their sick and twisted story of a lost man in a town filled with blood hungry cannibals, inept trigger-happy deputies and bat wielding elementary school teachers. Anyone in this game could get cut up including women, children and even babies. It then wraps the whole game up with a forced ironic ending about video games prolonging the cycle of violence throughout society. The truth is the only violence it created was from people throwing the disc for this game out the window and accidentally lodging it in someone's skull.

List by (12/31/1969)

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