Moving away from the politics of video game violence to some good 'ol fashioned, consequence-free mutilation, we have this vile eye impaling from the energetic sci-fi shooter Dead Space 2. In one of the more ridiculous moments of the game, you're forced to crawl inside a machine that wants to take a poke at one of your eyeballs. If you can complete the mini-game successfully, you get a small scratch and get on with your day, but if you fail - and as just about everyone did - you get treated to a wonderfully gratuitous cut-scene in which the needle stabs all the way through Isaac's head, reducing him to a twitchy red husk. Like just about everyone with eyes, I hate eye-related gore; it makes us feel especially queasy for some reason, and here it is perfectly exploited for maximum unease in a game that many feared would be too action-orientated. Oh, how wrong they were.