10 Video Games You Had To Hide From Your Parents

4. Mortal Kombat

Few games manage to stir the controversy pot with such a big skull-handled ladle as the MK series, and even now as we look towards MK X and the fact that powered by next-gen hardware it's going to be more disgusting tabloid-bait, you can't deny how much fun the series has been because of it.

The defining reason games like MK have become culturally renowned and other 'built to shock' titles like Postal have been completely buried, is down to good old fashioned solid gameplay. Even in its weakest instalments, MK has always been instantly playable due to a very tight fighting system, a cavalcade of memorable and loveable characters - and of course the signature fatalities.

Let your imagination run wild with what creative director Ed Boon and his team are going to do with the might of the new consoles, as with MK 9 we saw the likes of Kung Lao and Noob Saibot's finishers start to tip towards more downright off-putting levels of gore than ever before.

Depending on how forgiving your parents were, showing them these moves was the difference between a proclamation that video games were the work of monday-morning Satan himself, or a more laughable "Oh you" response - but either way Mortal Kombat became a household name because of it.