2. Mortal Kombat
When Street Fighter stormed the arcades and popularized the 2D fighting game, it inspired a raft of pretenders, most of which are long (and best) forgotten, but Midway's Mortal Kombat not only avoided that fate - it thrived. Partly this was thanks to a range of memorable characters, like the hooded ninjas Scorpion and Sub Zero, but a lot of the game's early notoriety was down to something else: blood and guts.
Every time you whacked an opponent, they threw out globules of the red stuff, somewhat improbably, and the game took this to another level with its party piece: fatalities. After beating an opponent to within an inch of their life, you could take that final inch with gratuitous aplomb by pulling off a particular button combo while "FINISH HIM" splashed up on the screen. Whether you diced them up or ripped out their spine, it was certainly a bit different to Street Fighter.
The series has sometimes been accused of being more concerned with its grisly finishing moves than good fighting game mechanics, but it seems to have found a better balance over the years, and seems likely to continue for some time to come.
1. Grand Theft Auto
The world heavyweight champion of controversial video games, the Grand Theft Auto series has so many individual controversies that we could write about them all day. The original top-down PC and console game was slammed for - among other things - rewarding you with a special "GOURANGA!" notification for running over a line of Hare Krishnas, as well as more mundane things like car theft, vehicular murder and sex and drug references.
The move to 3D saw DMA Design - as they were known in the days before Rockstar Games was a thing - up the ante by infamously creating systems that allowed you, should you wish, to sleep with a prostitute in your car before running her over and retrieving your money afterwards. Then we had Hot Coffee, a scandal that saw a deleted sex mini-game unearthed on game discs by hackers, prompting huge legal issues and a reclassification of GTA: San Andreas by ratings boards. More recently, GTA V had a torture mini-game where you could choose from a range of brutal implements to extract information from a largely innocent witness, as well as a scene in which one of your three playable characters was introduced by brutally and graphically murdering a previous playable character for no reason.
GTA reveled in its reputation as a posterchild for cultural rebellion and transgression, and while it's arguably lost some of its edge in recent years, it's still capable of stopping you in your tracks with random barbarity and absurd criminality. For people who can tell the difference between right and wrong, it remains a defiantly guilty pleasure.
