We're still not talking The Ice Storm, or even Seven, but the latest games about to arrive here show a healthy level of grown-up unpleasantness that's rather more in keeping with the new, older demographic that in the wake of the Playstation, now forms the bulk of Britain's gaming audience.

Now, there's nothing new about blood and guts in videogames per se, but until now they've mostly been seen in an unmistakeably slapstick, cartoony kind of context - it's difficult to imagine even the most sensitive viewer being genuinely disturbed by even the most excessive Itchy-and-Scratchy-style spine-ripping fatalities of Mortal Kombat 3. But there's a whole different kind of emotion being evoked when, in Bushido Blade, your character takes a crippling sledgehammer hit to the shinbone, spends the rest of the fight crawling around on his knees desperately fending off attacks, before finally succumbing and solemnly bowing his head to accept an honourable death by decapitation.

This is an entirely new kind of fighting game - there's no energy bar to be gradually worn down, no instant recovery from brutal attacks. If you get, say, your legs broken, they stay broken for the rest of the game, and you have to drag yourself around the arenas with your arms, a touch of pathos that's surprisingly affecting.

Bushido Blade's saving grace is that you have to fight honourably - stab an opponent in the back, or when he's down, and you'll be disqualified from properly completing the game. Cardinal Syn offers no such remorse - knock your enemy to the floor and you can hack their defenceless body to pieces in a wild-eyed primal frenzy, staining the ground with blood as you go. (And really alarming any onlookers watching you play.) After these two, Sega's arcade gun game House Of The Dead is almost light relief, with a never-ending wave of hideous flesh-devouring zombies advancing on the terrified player and leaping out of every corner to be extravagantly blown to bits in a body-part bonanza that, in its gleeful and liberal showering of guts and bone, is at least fractionally more akin to the over-the-top tongue-in-cheek antics of yesteryear.

But lest you think zombies are your pals, the undead brain-munchers are also back in Resident Evil 2, the much-hyped sequel to the skin-crawling Playstation hit of last year. The original Resident Evil was pretty spooky, but RE2 is piss-yourself scary, from the packs of zombies crashing in through windows to the horrible, pitiful way your hero-cop character limps and staggers ever more agonisingly and despairingly away from the relentlessly on-shuffling cadavers as you sustain injuries.