The Last of Us. Not due to the content (gore/blood etc), but because of how it felt. Seeing that vicious swing of Joel's metal pipe connect with the skull of another person never failed to make me cringe. The animation, fidelity of the assets and the sound design all came together in a way that felt properly brutal and inhuman.
Mortal Kombat 9 by far when it comes to just random gore and fighting. As far as shooting dudes goes, probably Call of Duty 4 or Modern Warfare 2. I remember one of the PS2 Shinobi games being super violent and gory.
The critical kill sound in Fallout 2 (was it in Fallout 1?) when you shoot someone with a machine gun or auto shotgun was nasty. That squishy sound was gross.
The Manhunt series was super fucked up. What bothered me wasn't so much the violence in general, but the context. That was some sadistic shit going on in those games.
Postal 2 was pretty violent, but it was so comical I had a hard time taking it seriously. That stuff was just funny to me.
I've played a lot of the games listed, but the two that had the most effect on me as far as its violence went would be...
The Suffering, one particular scene really, where you find a dude whose limbs have been cut off and is really only half a body at this point, but still kept alive and is just flopping around uselessly, and you have the choice to leave him there or put him out of his misery. That was real messed up.
And Shadow of Rome, you could hack limbs and heads and torsos off like crazy in that game, but what really made the violence sink in for me was when you would get these moments where maybe someones arm or arms have been chopped off but they are still alive and pleading with you not to kill them and would be so afraid sometimes they would pee themselves. So there would just be some guy or girl with a missing arm, kneeling in their own piss. That really got to me.
Mortal Kombat 9 got pretty intense on the violence scale, way above the average amount of viscera tearing. Condemned and The Last Of Us really made the violence feel, well, violent and nasty though.
Probably Doom 1 & 2. Rise of the Triad is up there as well. Of course, depending how you play, the GTA games can be incredibly violent. As an older gamer, I don't care much for the violence anymore. It's ran thin over time.
Solider of fortune 2. You could cut individual pieces of brain of the skulls.
Oh that's right! As a kid, I remember brutalizing the baddies in that, but not for the violence but to mess with the mechanics. They advertised that feature on the back of the case.
Most of the games that I play are pretty standard when it comes to gore. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that stands out for brutality would be Hotline Miami.
In terms of realistically looking like something that would happen yet still be disturbing the Last of Us is as violent as it gets. For gore who knows, probably God of War 3. Hotline Miami is violent but feels like a drug trip movie which takes some of the edge off.
I think there's a big difference between the cartoonish violence of a lot of games to some game's more somber portrayal of it. For example, I think a lot of the violence in The Last of Us is actually violent because your opposition actually get hurt and/or afraid and express that. On the flip side you have your over the top action games where you brute force your way against enemies but they never really seem hurt, they just die. I will say for how shitty of a game it was (but it was pretty funny enjoyed with a friend casually), Ride to Hell: Retribution had some really nasty violent finishing moves. Even worse when you were carrying some weapon that he just went crazy with. Another game in that regard is The Warriors on PS2. Smashing a guy over the head with a brick or glass bottle always looked brutal. Man, that game had a really fun versus mode now that I think about it.
That being said, still haven't seen a game really nail portraying really down to earth gritty violence. Even The Last of Us for all it's qualities still isn't worse off than an action film like Expendables or such in the violence department.
I don't think any game embraces violence to the degree of the Mortal Kombat series. It's staggering to think how they have escalated the comic gore throughout without becoming predominately macabre. Playing Deadly Alliance to witness the oddly congealed sluglike blood crawl on your characters and the floor was really messed up (and very cool). MK9 is of course known for its brutality in the X-Ray sequences, and now it seems MKX aims to be an even more devastatingly savage experience.
Actually, a better way to sum up my argument is to simply state the concept of the FATALITY.
If you take into account what everyone else was doing at the time then Soldier of Fortune was insane. I remember shooting a dude in the stomach and his guts spilled onto the floor. It was completely in a different league gore-wise than anything else at the time. Another big "innovation" was when FEAR let you nail dead guys to walls and they would rag doll against the building. Obviously MK was very violent for the time as well.
Soldier of Fortune 2 demo. At one point my arm was shot off, and something about the animation made me feel a little sick. Quit the demo and never went back. I can take cartoony violence just fine, but I wasn't the audience for that game.
Soldier of Fortune 2. Probably because of the time I played it, since it felt more visceral and real than things like Mortal Kombat (which was so cartoony it was closer to comedy).
Manhunt or Hotline Miami. As gory as Mortal Kombat can be, it's always just felt a little bit cartoony or silly, which brings down the sense of violence. Manhunt and Hotline never felt silly to me, so the sense of violence was much greater.
Most recently, there was a specific scene in BioShock Infinite: Burial At Sea Part 2 that seemed SUPER HARSH, not neccesarily graphic but extremely vivid. It was also the only cool thing about those DLCs.
It's most definitely Manhunt for me, some of those executions have a brutality and realness to them that I haven't seen replicated. Shout out to the homey from Shadow of Mordor though, Talion fights with a rage rarely seen in swordsmen in the realm of gaming.
That reminds me, the first time i used the skyhook in bishock infinite and got the brutal head kill along with that sharp violin crescendo. So perfectly timed as to make me audibly go HOLY SHIT.
Dead space is pretty up there, I mean you can literally smash on the stomp button in DS2 until Isaac is screaming curse words at the corpse your just wailing on...God Dead Space 2 was a fucking great game.
@jeanlucawesome: Yeah, the Cultists' screams when you burn them... damn. I've been playing that game at least once a year since it came out, and those screams are still kind of chilling in an otherwise humorous (albeit extremely violent, of course) game.
I do believe 'tis high time for Blood 3. Forget Half Life 3, I'm itching for a new game that barely avoids a C&D letter from Sam Raimi's lawyers.
When it first came out that Punisher PS2 game set a pretty high bar. Nowadays it's graphics dampen the effect a bit but it really was something else in terms of violence at the time.
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