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Can’t Wait For Bulletstorm? Try These Games

Epic’s new hyperviolent shooter Bulletstorm is built around the idea of the Creative Kill, and players are dying for the chance to mutilate some space mutants in this game.  The only problem is that it doesn’t come out for HOURS!  How will gamers fill the time until those midnight launch parties?  Below is a list of currently-available shooters that allow you to gruesomely murder enemies with as much ingenuity as you can muster.

Fallout 3 was known for its world building, and story-telling, but it also lets you blow stuff up real good too.  It uses an assistive targeting system that lets you select which body part you wish to hit.  For most of the game, this is used to aim for weakpoints, or systematically wear down the more powerful opponents, but by the time you hit the level cap, you’re an unstoppable killing machine, and the Vault-tech Assisted Targeting System let’s you imaginatively torture anyone who stumbles across your path.  You can methodically cripple your opponents' limbs, shoot weapons out of their hands and once you’ve had your fun, the game’s Bloody Mess perk lets you turn your victim into a pile of gibs.

If you’ve ever wanted to shoot someone with a railroad spike and nail their spine to the wall, give Fallout 3 a try.

Bulletstorm isn’t the first game to make horrid sadism a main feature of the game.  Way back in 2002 Raven Software released Soldier of Fortune 2.  It boasted a bunch of high-falutin’ features like realistic weapon designs and a random map generator, but the real draw was the "36 Gore Zones”.  In simple terms, this meant that the game could distinguish between body parts, and enemies would react differently depending on where they were shot.  You could shoot off feet and hands, and heads would blow apart in different ways depending on just where they were hit.

Even more fun, a well placed shogun blast would send chunks of bad guys flying all over the room.  Granted, it used 2002 era graphics and the truncated corpses looked like pieces of watermelon, but the vicious fun of this game still holds up pretty well.

An even older game that used the creative violence principle was Metal Gear Solid 2. This 2001 title was best known for its incomprehensible plot, and androgynous hero, but it also gave the player plenty of choices in how to deal with enemies.  You always had the option of a silent, non-lethal kill, and the game seemed to take that stance that killing and torturing people was a bad thing.  But that didn’t stop the designers from putting in a host of nasty things for players to do to bad guys.

The hapless guards could be shot in the arms, which would leave them alive, but unable to defend themselves while the player then proceeded to shoot them in the legs, or even the scrotum!  Not only that, but each guard had a radio which could be used to call for back-up.  Sadly for them, one well-placed shot from a cunning player would take out the radio, leaving the poor guard alone and at your mercy while you repeatedly beat him senseless with a wide selection of hand-to-hand techniques, including a neck-snap!  Lead Designer Hideo Kojima seems like such a nice fellow, but he also went so far as to include a mugging minigame in which players could shakedown guards for collectible dog tags.

If your bloodlust just can’t wait out the remaining hours until that copy of Bulletstorm is in your hands, then spend the day with one these gory classics.

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