Video games have gained an older audience over the years, and that means developers have to appeal to a more mature demographic these days. In a few decades that may mean games like "Wheelchair Racing Xtreme Challenge," but for now it just means lots and lots of blood. Some of the top games of today feature gory headshots, realistic battle damage, and enemies being reduced to hamburger by chainsaws. But while blood and gore can add an element of realism to a game, if done badly, all it does is make you wonder how badly the game designers failed anatomy class. Here are a few games that featured some of the more ridiculous depictions of blood and gore in recent memory.

6. Tony Hawk 3

The Tony Hawk series usually features a minimal amount of blood, which tends to only show up when you slam your head on a curb. If you've ever seen a skating video featuring nothing but bails, you know that people can get knocked around pretty hard and even badly injured. But no one ever slides down a ramp or an obstacle leaving a perfect red trail behind them. The aftermath of certain slip ups in this and other TH games looked more like the player's head had been temporarily replaced with a magic marker. No one's really asking for blood and gore in their sports games, so you have to wonder why Neversoft even tried to add any. But they did, and it just looked ridiculous.

5. Mortal Kombat series

Mortal Kombat is credited with bringing violence in video games to the mainstream (and sadly, also to congress). If you were a kid in the early 90's, odd are that Mortal Kombat was the first game you ever played that had blood. Still, looking back on the games now, it's obvious that no one was all that concerned with how the blood actually looked. Otherwise people might have stepped back a bit and realized that all the "gore" in the original arcade games could just as easily be mistaken for some overfilled jelly donuts stuffed into the fighters clothing. Blood in the original games basically just burst out of characters in gooey little explosions. It's over-the-top for sure, but any kid who's skinned their knee knows people aren't filled with bright red pudding.

4. Starcraft

When you've got a game that features literally hundreds of units battling it out, you've got a find a way to make them disappear quickly once they start dying; otherwise a bunch of dead marines and aliens are going to start cluttering up the battlefield. That's probably why most of the soldiers in Starcraft seem to have a tiny explosive built into them that detonates when they die, leaving nothing but a small pool of blood which quickly soaks into the ground. Admittedly, this method of dying is seen in a lot of games, but it's a little more noticeable in Starcraft, where you see it happen to a few dozen units at once many times.

3. Medal of Honor series

If you've ever played a Medal of Honor game, you may be asking yourself, "What blood?" And that is exactly my point. Medal of Honor was one of the first World War II games that tried to go for a realistic feel (i.e. taking out the cyborg Hitler from Wolfenstein). But the publisher still wanted the coveted "Teen" rating, so they decided to make the whole game blood-free. Thus, when you storm the beaches of Normandy, you'll see hundreds of soldiers, elaborate explosions, some remarkable set pieces...but not a drop of blood. It's understandable, but still a little odd for a game going for realism. This was passable in the PS1 days, but even 2007's Medal of Honor: Airborne seemed be made up of enemies with bone-dry veins.

2. Soldier of Fortune: Payback

The Soldier of Fortune series made it's mark on the gaming world by pushing the bar for depictions of gore -- it kind of had to do something since the gameplay was pretty standard for a first-person shooter. While most game developers poured their resources into such things as interesting level design and story-telling, the guys behind Soldier of Fortune put all their efforts into creating some of the most brutal and realistic digital gore of the time. Enemies would react to exactly where you shot them, their bodies would show bullet-holes, and a shotgun blast to the stomach would even leave intestines falling out. It actually all got quite disturbing after awhile.

Today though, almost every other popular game features plenty of gore, so how could a new Soldier of Fortune distinguish itself anymore? The answer was apparently to up the amount of blood to ridiculous levels. In Payback, enemies seem to be made entirely of blood-filled water balloons, as any hit will illicit a fountain of blood that will usually continue long after they have fallen dead. It doesn't help either that the phyics engine is a little off, meaning that terrorists will sometimes go flying through the air spraying blood everywhere like a soda bottle that had a Mentos dropped in it. If they die by explosion, this effect is quadrupled as their individual limbs go flying in separate directions, also spewing gore. I'm not an expert on human anatomy, but I'm fairly certain we're not composed of about a dozen hearts placed throughout our bodies that can operate independent of each other.

1. Nanobreaker

When a game features a "Plasma Sword" and a meter that displays the gallons of blood you've spilled, you can be sure there's going to be plenty of gore to be found in it. Nanobreaker is probably the only game on this list where the developers obviously knew the blood in their game looked ridiculous. All the enemies are basically walking blood packs that have been filled with twice the normal amount of fluid. Even the slightest cut results in a solid geyser of blood shooting out of them and pooling on the floor. Since the gameplay centers around hordes of enemies being diced into tiny chunks, there are numerous times where the flowing digital blood fills the entire screen. Personally, if I really wanted to build up an evil army, I probably wouldn't recruit thousands of hemophiliacs with extremely high blood pressure.