Made Of Plasticine / Video Games

• The Mortal Kombat games. The fighters are Made of Iron during matches, but the games are very fond of doing gruesome things to defeated fighters when it comes time to "FINISH HIM!" — ripping someone's head off and taking his spine with it, punching right into someone's chest and ripping out his heart, ripping someone's arms right out of their sockets, ripping someone in half, and even pulling someone's skeleton right out of his body! Some moves will cause as many as a half dozen ribcages to fly out of the victim. And that's not even going into the weird weapons and powers that many Mortal Kombat fighters employ.
• The Doom series has this in spades — toxic barrels, rockets, the BFG and even your fists (with the berserk pack) can splatter most enemies into a pile of giblets. CHUNKY!
  • Brutal Doom is a mod that takes the gore of Doom and runs with it into a meat grinder. With new and re-worked weapons, Doomguy can now rip and tear apart every enemy in-game. Unfortunately, so can they. From blasting chunks off a Cacodemon to blasting an Imp's leg off, to the finishers of the Berserk Pack, Brutal Doom earns its name.
• Smash TV and its Spiritual Successor Total Carnage are even more ridiculous. Most of your weapons (e.g. the triple shot) would chunkify most of the Mooks. And, despite sporting massive muscles, mere physical contact with some of these games' enemies will chunkify them.
• Duke Nukem 3D (and probably his other appearances). Out of nine guns, three of them actually leave a corpse behind; there are four explosives that will gib enemies, a shrink ray that lets you step on them, and after freezing someone with the freeze ray you have to kick or shoot them to make their entire body shatter (and if you don't do that fast enough they will come unfrozen still intact). Not to mention explosive level elements and the fact that if someone gets crushed by a piston instead of a body they will leave a sticky, stretchy string of miscellaneous gore attached to it as it continues going up and down. To top it off, if you played on the hardest difficulty any enemy who did leave a corpse would respawn, so you were strongly encouraged to gib as many as possible.
• Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven features the doctor character Tesshu. While other characters use bladed weapons for their stealth kills, Tesshu uses only his fists, so how is he going to kill someone quietly? Well, by either jamming both hands into their back, pushing his whole fist into the bottom of their spine, breaking both arms and then their neck while watching them stagger, or even the truly ridiculous plunging his hand into their chest and pulling out their heart, then squishing it. About the only thing he does that is even conceivable is jab a needle into their neck and hitting vital nerves.
• Unreal Tournament. Especially Unreal Tournament 2004 with the Ballistic Weapons mod, or Unreal Tournament III... the flak cannon and impact hammer in particular. Splorch. Although, strangely enough, in 2004, the abdomen is completely indestructible. Presumably a limitation of the engine, but it's quite hilarious to see the remains of a player blown to bits with a rocket launcher: an unharmed, fully armored crotch lying in a pile of bloodied gibs.
• In Resident Evil 4, Los Ganados and other hosts of Las Plagas alternate between this and being Made of Iron. Sure, those first three shotgun blasts in the chest were just annoying, but that last fan-kick decapitated two of them at once!
• The so bad it's good Fist of the North Star NES game. All of it. In one punch enemies will pulse strangely and then explode into blue fragments that fly across the screen. Why blue? Nobody knows.
• Applies in some Drakengard cutscenes. Also applies to any armor.
• Lampshaded in Urban Chaos: Riot Response for PS2, Xbox, and PC. When you get a headshot on a gang member (which you will, as there is a bonus for doing so) the hapless target's head bursts like an overripe melon; other gang members in the area will proceed to yell out something along the lines of "HOLY SHIT, HE JUST BLEW THAT GUY'S HEAD OFF!"
• Toribash makes dismemberment very easy, and fighters can still exert control over their own severed limbs. This opens up endless possibilities for attacks, including tossing your own arm at the opponent, making it grab onto him and bash him repeatedly - one built-in replay even has the player character tossing his own head to bowl over his opponent. Half the fun of the game is figuring out new ways to dismember the opponent (or even yourself, if you're that bored).
• Oddly subverted in Space Siege. A main character gets pushed off a railing (Read thrown back by an alien punch) lands on a transit car eight feet down then lands on the station another seven feet down. He's not dead by he is really bad shape. The alien dies a gruesome death from the player character's rage.
• As the title implies, Splatterhouse. Check out the image on its page for a good example.
• The squad level strategy game Jagged Alliance 2 features special death animations for certain forms of killing an opponent. Killing an enemy with certain ammo (for example assault rifle ammo like 7.62 or 5.56), by firing at an unprotected head, will sometimes cause said head to explode. Also firing in rapid succession (burst) at an enemy's unprotected chest will sometimes cause the follow-up bullets to burst through his/her chest with the person dramatically flying backwards. Also using explosives like certain grenades or bombs will blow the bodies up with only blood remaining. Heavy explosives can also reduce enemies to ash. This is all commented by the player's characters as not very nice. Luckily the game has only pixel animation graphics.
• I Wanna Be the Guy of course. The Kid explodes into Ludicrous Gibs when touched once by an enemy... or nearly anything else, for that matter.
• In Fallout 3 it's possible to cause limbs and heads to come off in a shower of gore with any weapons, including your character's bare hands. Not to mention taking the "bloody mess" perk has a chance of causing anyone the player kills to explode into Ludicrous Gibs. The first 2 Fallout games have more reasonable subdued weapon effects unless you're using a powerful weapon, in which case you can do things like cutting people cleanly in half with just a short burst from your chaingun. If you take the aforementioned "bloody mess" perk, you'll be able to vaporize half a person's body with a pistol.
  • Dead bodies in this game are so ridiculously fragile, it is even well possible for one's legs to break off under its own weight!
• Dead Space is a prime example, almost to Trope Codifier status. Bodies of humans, aliens and necromorphs alike seem to be all held together with paper glue and a prayer, being dismembered with a single arm swing or stomp after they hit Critical Existence Failure. It's so bad that someone actually created a montage of Isaac's deaths!⁺Notice how in every single death scene save for the Swarmer's, Isaac gets decapitated. And more bizarrely, the Immature Guardian's wimpy flailing will dismantle his entire body on a kill. Dead Space 2 also invokes this with the first onscreen death (NSFW); the player is given an up-close view of a man transforming into a necromorph right in Isaac's face, wherein appendages push out of his shoulders without difficulty, before most of his face easily crumbles away like pastry.
• In Left 4 Dead, the players are assaulted by hordes of zombies, who have a tendency to gib rather spectacularly when hit at close range with, say, an auto fire shotgun.
  • The sequel takes this trope and turns it up to eleven, as can be seen here. Partially subverted in that the skeleton and most organs are clearly visible through the gore, which just adds to the effect.
• In the short freeware side scroller Bert the Barbarian, your enemies are quite literally made of plasticine AND fall under this trope.
• The arcade game Who Dunit stars Max, a character who is instantly skeletonized after being killed by anything, including dog bites, falling books, flying pimp hats, and even a beach ball.
• MadWorld. Even if you don't use the default chainsaw, you can still dismember your opponents with your bare hands. Like Mortal Kombat, you can rip out a man's beating heart, then crush it in your fist. Or hold him up against a moving train and watch his limbs fly off from the friction. Or hit the skulls off of zombies with a golf club...
• In the Lego video games, death causes characters to fall to pieces, and Chewbacca rips arms out easily. Justified, obviously, in that they're made of plastic.
  • Anyone who has ever struggled to separate two Lego bricks that were connected with the equivalent bonding strength of arc welding will agree that this trope is still very much played straight in the game.
• In Starcraft, most flesh & blood units practically explode on death, even if they were killed by toxic gas (i.e. Irradiate from a Science Vessel).
• In Dead Rising, freelance photojournalist Frank West can kill zombies in all sorts of hilarious dismembering ways, including with his bare hands. Heads can be kicked off, intestines ripped out, faces pulped, etc. If anything, the sequel ups the ante.
• God of War tends to do this— at least in the cutscenes.
• Team Fortress 2 was originally going to take this literally, with all of the mercenaries replaced by claymation models of themselves. It's slightly more realistic now, but still full of Ludicrous Gibs.
  • The Halloween 2011 update added a badge that, when worn, causes players to explode violently (with a flashy, loud explosion) when they die, regardless of the cause of death.
• In Harvester, so much as getting hit on the head with a baseball bat will make a character's organs explode out of them.
• [PROTOTYPE] justifies this trope, as Alex Mercer has the strength to easily throw a tank, while much of his arsenal consists of Absurdly Sharp Blades, meaning many of his enemies seem like this trope in comparison. Specific examples include:
  • Your claws have no trouble shredding an armored soldier in one swipe, and your extend-o-tentacle can sweep round a big circle that instantly separates the upper and lower torsos of every enemy within a certain radius.
  • And then there's the Musclemass ability, which can dissolve regular mooks with a simple punch One of the muscle mass consume animations, in which Alex simply pulls someone in half, right down the middle.
  • The trope is less justified with less supernatural weapons as ordinary assault rifles cut someone in half, a grenade liquefies them, and being hit by a car leads to their organs spread across the hood and windshield...
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In Daggerfall, Townie NPCs explode in a shower of blood should you attack them. Even if it is only a measly punch.
  • Skyrim:
    • Some of the "Kill Cam" animations qualify. For instance, it may trigger and show you beheading an armored NPC enemy with a low-level ancient axe which has been sitting unused in a tomb for the past 3000 years.
    • Grelod the Kind, the nasty old orphanage headmistress in is the weakest NPC you meet in the game. She is so weak, that you can kill her with the weakest version from your first Dragon Shout, which normally inflicts no damage and only causes a slight stagger. (Though, given her nasty nature, you will be tempted to do a little more or a lot more than that...)
• Dragon Age: Origins was pretty intense on the blood and guts, but Dragon Age II takes it to ridiculous levels; when you kill somebody, they freaking explode into body parts and gallons of blood, even if they were only a hit by a small dagger. This is most likely thanks to the Narrator's admitted embellishment of the events in the story.
• Enemies in Baldur's Gate are blown to pieces if enough damage is done to them all at once. Since the damage can come from anything from swords to daggers to bows, this can make sense in some cases—such as when a high-powered magical attack causes this—and in some cases it's ridiculous—such as when a few arrows hit one creature at the same time and it explodes.
  • It gets really absurd when you start doing this with tiny rocks from slings or darts.
• One thing that makes Happy Wheels so challenging (besides the chaotic levels) is the fact that the smallest wipeout from a bike, wheelchair, or Segway can cause your character to lose limbs, break their neck, or sometimes explode into a bloody mess of gibs.
• The now shut down Arctic Combat featured soldiers losing arms, legs, and heads to even weapons firing the relatively anemic 9mm round. Half of the fun of the game was running around and watching heads disappear from other players after you thwacked them with the stock of your weapon.
• Bryce, the protagonist of Never Dead is easily dismembered by any particularly strong hit. Good thing that he's an immortal who can pick himself up back together just by rolling over body parts or regrow them at will.
• A lot of physics-based games have frail enemies so it wouldn't be overly difficult to crush the enemies and objects. Examples include Gish and Crush the Castle.
• The Gears of War games have this with execution moves. While it's reasonable to have explosions or a heavy machinegun blow people apart, anyone is able to reduce an enemy's head to paste with a single stomp, even when they're wearing a helmet.
  • Unless the One Shot fires high-explosive shells, there's no reason why an oversized sniper rifle would instantly turn someone's entire upper body into a shower of red mist.
• The cheap game OMG-Z is entirely based around this. It's a Zombie Apocalypse, and the screens are overrun with hordes of zombies. However, in this game, zombies fall apart with a light touch—some even explode outright, so the goal of the game is to clear hundreds of zombies out by starting an exploding zombie chain reaction. Note that not all zombies explode, though: some, like the soldier and policeman, just fall to the ground and their gun-arm comes off, firing the gun into the nearby crowd of zombies. Others melt into acidic goo puddles. Basically, zombies are totally weaksauce. The only reason the plague spread at all is because of the highly-infectious spray that results when one falls apart.
• Dishonored falls victim to this. You can shoot a man in the head with your crossbow, and his head will be taken clean off and speared to the wall behind him.
• Paint the Town Red:
  • Enemies in the game are simultaneously this and Made of Iron. It's remarkably easy to maim and mutilate them, to the point that you can shave the skin off their voxel heads with a plastic comb. However, they can also potentially take a ton of punishment before they actually die (especially bosses), meaning it's not unusual to remove an enemy's face, one of their arms and have several blades sticking out of them and still see them get back up to single-mindedly kick your ass.
  • There are a few level modifiers that exaggerate the trope. "Weak Enemies" makes enemies so brittle that a mere punch will kill them instantly, "Weak Player" makes you a One-Hit-Point Wonder, "Soft Voxels" makes the enemies' voxels easier to destroy (thus making dismembering them far easier), and "Splatter" makes the enemies explode into gibs upon killing them.
• Dwarf Fortress: The game is particularly weird about both this and Made of Iron, depending on the current bugs and system implementation. Pre-material overhaul, people's heads would explode into gore from thrown socks, and even now the occasional thrown pebble will cause horrible bruises. At one point, plant seeds dropped from a couple of z-levels high struck people like bullets, breaking bones and piercing brains. And more persistently, people can be killed by being bludgeoned with silk clothing or empty backpacks, and if anything knocks you back even by one tile you can skid head-first across the tile and brain yourself messily.
• I Am Bread features no living creatures (besides, arguably, the eponymous slice), but dishes will shatter at the slightest impact or pressure.
• In the storyline for Call of Duty: Black Ops grenades, explosives, and even some of the firearms will sever limbs with ease.
• Shellshock Nam 67 also features mooks and even the main character being easily dismembered and/or decapitated by machine guns or sniper rifles.
• Cooking Simulator by default has plates and bottles that break so easily that actually using them as plates and bottles represents the main obstacle in the game. You can buy kitchen upgrades to make this stop.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Despite bring made of the allegedly amazingly durable alien alloys, the structures of UFOs are extraordinarily fragile. Walls and most cover objects in them break apart in huge chunks like they're made of rice paper when hit by any cover-destroying effect like explosions, plasma/laser, or even light machine gun fire, and it's not unusual for tke interior of an alien ship to end up with less available cover than a human building ravaged by a battle.

---