If sex is too scarce in video games, violence is over abundant. Where sex is confined to timid half-measures, game developers are only too happy to soak their imaginations in violent possibility. It's a pleasure to pretend we're violent, to see our hidden anxieties projected into a hyperbolic war zone. This capacity to connect an abstract impulse to a very specific simulation makes some people. All of the ragged shadows we'd agreed to politely smooth over have found an unsupervised goratorium in video games.

<a+class='autolink'+href='https://xbox360.ign.com/objects/063/063756.html'>Limbo</a>

Kids+die+in+the+damnedest+ways.

Heavy+Rain

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Donkey+Kong+Country+Returns

The+voodoo+baby+rattle+shake.

2010 was a conservative year for violence in games. There weren't many titles that pushed the borders of polite society, nor tested our reactionary instincts against simulations of suffering. Yet even in this narrow and repetitive form there is a variety in games that evokes a surprisingly wide variety of emotions. While all violent acts might be described as identical--a choice to step across an edge of human solidarity--the circumstances that lead toward and away from that edge are all unique in their own way. Here then are the most remarkable moments of video game violence in 2010. Limbo is a silhouetted journey through the afterlife, a young boy searching for his sister in a world of loneliness. It's also got a merciless sense for gore, made even more powerful by the shadowy visuals. As you guide the boy through the colorless world he'll be split in half by bear traps, scorched by fire, crushed by rotating gears, and drowned in pools of water.The deaths are all pantomimes brought alive but alarmingly vivid sound effects and a terrific unpredictability. Fall into a bear trap once and you may see the boy's head snapped off and sent arcing into the air. The next time it may be an arm that's severed, or a perfect bisection at the hips. Worst for me was the falling death. If you climb high enough and miss a jump the boy will drop down and crumple into a lumpy pile on the ground below. The body is an unrecognizable mound but the head always remains intact.It's a brilliant match suggesting bone and tissue inside the black silhouettes. The violent deaths underscore a constant sense of the unseen, a mirror for the overarching absence of the sister who never seems to be there.Death is the easiest way to tell a player they've failed, and it's also the easiest way to show a player they've succeeded. It's not possible to kill another character in Heavy Rain for hours, but when you can finally can it's a disarming moment. Once you've tracked down the first serial killer suspect you discover his apartment is a dilapidating shrine to religious asceticism. He'll walk in on your investigation and aim his gun at your splenetic partner.As you pull your gun you can choose to try and talk him out of shooting your partner or you can shoot him without hesitation. It's a stunning moment because it doesn't emphasize passing or failing with the shot. If you choose to shoot you'll hit him. It's not a test of reflex but a test of morality. It's a dilemma in the original Greek sense, a choice between two equally bad outcomes.Either choice presents you with a dead body and implicates you in the death. In this way, Heavy Rain is one of the most realistically violent games yet. It emphasizes all the awful after effects of violence, even when that act is justified. It's a reminder that violent choices are not about finding a path to victory but choosing which part of yourself you're willing to lose.Nintendo has mastered violence in the name of adolescent experimentation. In the same way that babies laugh when they pull the silverware drawer off its track and teenagers cackle in delight at firecrackers, Donkey Kong Country Returns delivers satisfaction in smashing enemies and shattering wooden boxes. Building on the fist-pounding of Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat, Retro has tied Donkey's angry ground pound to the alternate shaking of the Wii remote and Nunchuk.The shake-the-remote-to-break-things approach has become a true sub-genre on Wii, one that's almost always wrapped in vivid, wriggling visuals that mask the violence with cuteness. Donkey Kong excels at this while adding the slightly more unsettling subtext of possession. This was one the definitive themes of the Metroid Prime series, and it finds a surprising new context in the magical voodoo rainforest. Donkey's nemeses are possessed jungle dwellers used as pawns in a banana smuggling operation.Instead of spilling their guts, or shooting their brains out, Donkey squashes them and, in the case of bosses, beats the devil out of them. Conscious or not, it's a happy match of adolescent acting out against witchy paranoia. Consider it the Serpent and the Rainbow of video games. But starring monkeys.