Ludicrous Gibs



""Ooh, they're goin' ta' have ta' glue you back together... IN HELL!""

- The Demoman, Team Fortress 2, "Meet the Demoman"

The (usually) FPS equivalent of the deliberately ridiculous splatter seen in Peter Jackson's early films. FPS makers who include gore and dismemberment effects (commonly known as "gibbing" or "gibs", short for "giblets") will often go overboard with them and make relatively simple weapons create far more grotesque splatter than you would expect from their real-world equivalents. This can be especially jarring, as the default handling of violence in most media is to err the other way--undersized or nonexistent entry and exit wounds are more common than ones that properly match the weapon used.

Refuge in Audacity is the key to this trope: Seeing a man realistically take a bullet to the jaw is terrifying and could quickly turn a fun game into Serious Business and Nausea Fuel. But if that man's head instead explodes into a cornucopia of viscera and grey matter, we have a harder time taking it seriously and can relax some.

Being already dead tends to end like this.

Of course, expect Critical Existence Failure: the same rocket that blows a player into bite-sized pieces will leave him bruised, but in one piece if he's got enough health.

Compare Made of Plasticine (this is the video game equivalent), Bloodier and Gorier. Compare and contrast Pink Mist, a tamer, more realistic phenomena usually associated with real world head shots. See also the Chunky Salsa Rule and Overdrawn At the Blood Bank. And, of course, Bloody Hilarious.

Has nothing to do with a certain NCIS agent behaving in an amusing manner. As if he'd ever behave ludicrously.

Action Adventure

 * Castlevania was pretty light on the gore for a horror series—until Symphony of the Night, that is. Alucard's ability to heal by absorbing blood made it necessary for lots of enemies to bleed. (Kill an Evil Butcher with a sword if you want to see some real gushworks.) Since then, probably because Symphony became the new model for CV games, enemies have bled profusely.
 * It gets even better in Order of Ecclesia, where the fight with Brachyura ends with you dropping a spiked elevator on the git, shoving him down fifteen screens of lighthouse and splattering him into a great many bits when you reach bottom. The bits are still there if you come back later.
 * Also since Symphony (It was first used with Richter in Rondo of Blood, but this game is where it became the standard), when the main character is killed it sends them screaming into the air while they turn into a cloud of blood. It makes strong attacks from bosses seem extra dramatic. It becomes hilarious when low on health, you lightly touch a minor enemy and get a completely over the top death.
 * Additionally, playing as Maria in Rondo of Blood spares her from Richter's overly bloody death, falling to the ground and disintegrating to nothing instead. She gains the overly bloody death in Portrait of Ruin, however.
 * An exception is Order of Ecclesia, where you only die in a cloud of blood if Shanoa is killed in the air. Landbound, she just groans and keels over
 * Even beyond that - it's possible during the Brachyura battle to get killed just as you trigger the elevator, which results in both the boss and Shanoa gushing High-Pressure Blood until the elevator reaches the bottom of the shaft. The entire trip down. If you think a human being spewing enough blood to fill a decent-sized wading pool in three seconds is over the top, imagine the animation going on for thirty...
 * The most gratuitously violent Castlevania to date is probably Harmony of Dissonance. There's one particular instance where you're just exploring some caves, you flick a switch...
 * Lords of Shadow: Being Darker and Edgier than most of the series up until this point, any flesh enemy killed with the subweapon they're weak to (Silver daggers for werewolves, holy water for undead, ect. ect.) or a heavy attack will explode into a shower of gore on contact.
 * In Red Dead Redemption. Tying someone up and putting them on train tracks.

Action Game

 * The modern Ninja Gaiden release for the Xbox featured decapitations; the sequel on the Xbox 360 goes beyond its predecessor's decaps into full limb dismemberment and body mutilation, as the video downloadable here truthfully shows. Averted in the last of the modern trilogy, which does away this trope entirely for High-Pressure Blood.
 * In God of War, pretty much everything results in ridiculous amounts of gore. Even an arrow to the cranium will cause total disintegration of the head in a massive shower of blood.
 * The OneChanbara games are so gory that your character and their sword getting covered in blood are actually part of the game mechanics—once your character is sufficiently covered in blood, they go into a Super Mode that has the disadvantage of increasing the damage they take and constantly draining health, while you need to periodically clean the blood off your sword to keep it from getting stuck in enemies and to keep the combo timing regular.
 * The Freeware Games Survivor: The Living Dead. Well you can have zombies without bloody carnage right? Even the tar zombies spout gouts of blood when beheaded. Here, take a look at all that pixaly, head-splattering gore

Beat'Em Up

 * The Dishwasher has a whole slew of ways to turn enemies into assorted bloodstains and organs, including, but not limited to: shotguns, overloading them with lightning attacks, pile-driving them into the ground, bashing their skulls into the ground/wall/ceiling, tearing their necks out with your teeth, and tried and true method of cutting them down the middle.
 * Online Adult Swim flash game Viva Caligula does this when the titular character enters "berserk mode" or when a weapon is levelled up in the sequel.

Fighting Game

 * Mortal Kombat, of course. Not only are the fatalities all ludicrously bloody, even normal punches and kicks cause spurts of blood.
 * Starting with Mortal Kombat 2, when the creators went for the dark humor angle, most fatalities would create some actual ludicrous gibs from one character: a full-body 'splosion would yield about seven severed legs, twenty dog-bone-shaped bones, a lung or two, and nothing else. Another fatality would decapitate the victim three times in quick succession resulting in one headless body and three identical severed heads.
 * Mortal Kombat 3 adds two skulls and three ribcages per character to the mix. (Ludicrous ribs!)
 * When the series went 3-D, fatalities would cause characters to break apart into weird chunks of flesh - reviewers dubbed these games the "bloody popcorn" era.
 * With Mortal Kombat 9, we are now treated to X-Ray Mode, which allows us to see bones and organs shattering inside the victim's body in real time. Characters can have their skulls fractured, eyes gouged, and intestines ruptured multiple times and still keep up the fight.
 * Speaking of robots, the fighting game One Must Fall 2097 had a secret function allowing the player to control how much "gibs" (gears and bits of metal in this case) would appear. At the highest setting, a single hit would release more scrap metal than the victim could possibly have contained. There was even an option to have metal gibs continually rain down throughout the match.

First-Person Shooter

 * The trope name comes from Rise of the Triad, which positively revelled in ludicrous weapons and gibbing effects. The message Ludicrous Gibs! would appear on-screen whenever the player gibbed enemies in the most spectacular fashion allowed. This would usually involve chunks of flesh and splashes of blood being spread in a wide radius and a torn-out eye sliding down the screen. The Flamewall launcher would burn the flesh off enemies in a couple of seconds, leaving the charred (and smiling!) skeletons standing for a moment before collapsing (still smiling!) to the ground. The God Mode powerup enabled the player to launch enemy-seeking balls of lighting that would disintegrate, albeit bloodlessly, any enemy they touched. And, Apogee never being the types to pass up the opportunity for a cheap joke, Dog Mode allowed the player to charge up a sonic dog bark, spontaneously popping every Mook within range like a pressed grape.
 * Enabling "Engine Killing Gibs" mode in Rise of the Triad forcibly set all baddie-fragging animations to the "Ludicrous Gibs!" splatter, thereby increasing the amount of gore several times and creating massive clouds of body parts when enemies were blown up. If you watched closely you could see enemies' severed hands wiggling their middle fingers while flying through the air along with the eyeball splattering into the screen and sliding down. Also, it's worth noting that while modern processors would (and do - look up GLRott) eat the game's code for lunch without missing a beat, in the 386/486 era during which the game was initially released, the amount of gore being rendered (with no GPU assistance as this predated true 3D games) may very well have been literally engine-killing, posing too great a challenge for the CPUs of the day to draw and either slowing the game to a crawl or crashing it completely.
 * Doom is one of the earlier examples of such overblown effects. If lesser enemies (or players in Deathmatches) were hit with an attack that reduced their health to their starting health times negative one (i.e. negative 30 for a Shotgun Zombie, who starts with 30 health), they would be gibbed. This was a reasonable result when they were hit by rockets, but picking up a special "Berzerker" "Berserk" power-up enabled the player to gib enemies with his bare hands.
 * Sometimes you can melee-gib enemies even without the Berserker.
 * If a Zombieman (the weakest enemy) doesn't die with one plasma shot, the next plasma shot will usually gib him.
 * The Cyberdemon requires a lot of damage to be killed, 45 rocket hits, 55 shotgun blasts, or 400 handgun shots. No matter how much damage he's taken, he never shows so much as a dent until he is killed, but his only death animation is him exploding and leaving behind a pair of bloodied hooves. You can shoot him in the face with a shotgun 54 times, and he still has no visible damage, but he would vaporize when next hit by one bullet.
 * Quick note, those numbers are averages, as the game has a random number generator for damage.
 * There's a mod called "Beautiful Doom" which, among other things, increases the gibs to, well, ludicrous levels.
 * Brutal Doom does this to such levels that the room you're in is literally painted with blood. Not to mention the facts that you can perform a Fatality while in berserk mode in the same gore-happy fashion as Mortal Kombat, that mouth monsters can literally bite your torso off, and that the chainsaw can actually hack away at body parts with impressive results.
 * In Doom 3 the shotgun packs enough punch that if you hit a zombie with it at point blank range you'll tear all the flesh off its bones, reducing it to a bloodied skeleton.
 * Given the way gibs are calculated in the Doom series (total damage dealt must be equal to or greater than twice the monster's maximum HP) and the fact that Doom 3's zombies simply ragdoll and leave perfectly viable corpses behind, hitting a dead zombie with so much as a flashlight would usually cause it to explode violently.
 * Punching a civilian can result in his head instantly evaporating and his brain flying out.
 * Bulletstorm is all about this.
 * For F.E.A.R., this is can happen to living being short of Powered Armor or Mini-Mecha, provided you have a Combat Shotgun or an explosive weapon. Given that the damage calculated has to be a one-hit overkill for this to take effect, it has a better chance of happening when enemies are caught off-guard. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you want to leave the skeleton intact? Then pack a Particle Weapon or a deranged psychic... like Alma.
 * Fighting medium sized groups of flood in Halo usually leaves behind a room almost fully covered in body parts of different size.
 * In Halo: Reach, getting headshots on the Drones (the bugs) turns them into this.
 * Blood; Mostly through the use of the amusingly overpowered napalm launcher, or any of three different varieties of dynamite. The gibs in Blood had the wonderfully gruesome property of being slippery under your character's feet, and for some reason the game developers saw the potential of including the ability to use zombies' heads (usually the largest surviving pieces of them after a close encounter with a barrel of high explosive) as soccer balls.
 * The original Soldier of Fortune featured a ridiculously overpowered shotgun that could blow limbs clean off at an unrealistic range, a look-alike Desert Eagle pistol that could remove a head from the neck up and a microwave pulse gun that would cause enemies to cook from within and burst like overcooked hot dogs.
 * The second game has somewhat more realistic gore, but Payback takes it Up to Eleven, with enemies practically Made of Plasticine and decapitations and amputations resulting in gory gushers, spewing more blood than is held in the typical human circulatory system. The novelty wears off quickly.
 * The second game advertised "16 points of dismemberment".
 * Explosive weapons would gib enemies in Duke Nukem 3D, but the game also had a shrink gun that would miniaturize a foe and allow you to squish him under your foot, and a freeze ray that would allow you to freeze them solid and then smash them like ice statues.
 * The newest version of the Duke Nukem 3D High Resolution Pack mod feeds off this, with a separate patch specifically designed to stick blood spatter to walls!
 * Whenever an enemy gets crushed by a big door, it leaves behind a disgusting mass of goo that stretches across the gap when said door is opened.
 * If you step into a corpse, you leave bloody footsteps for a while afterward.
 * The titular vivisection point of the PC game ''Vivisector: Beast Within" allowed massive chunks of flesh to be ripped away from an enemy with little more than a pistol, and even the basic knife or scalpel weapon could completely gib an enemy without much difficulty under the right circumstances.
 * In the original Quake, zombies would only die if gibbed. If just shot down they would wake up after a few seconds and resume attacking.
 * In Quake II, the only way to prevent the Medic's revival of fallen Stroggs is gibbing them.
 * Also, while in many games only explosive weapons can gib enemies, in Quake gibbing is calculated based on how much under zero an enemy's health goes. This generally works (if an enemy is in the middle of an explosion it makes sense that its health would go negative enough to cause gibbing), but it makes it possible to unrealistically gib smaller enemies with many shots of the Blaster, or even the Shotgun/Super Shotgun.
 * This was used intentionally in the various Custom-TF mods, in which a player with the Warlock skill could gib corpses with his knife and pick up the scattered chunks of meat, later using it to summon monsters.
 * In Quake II, the super shotgun is enough to dismember a Stroggo, leaving a skinned torso spinning in midair.
 * In Quake II, not only could you gib someone with a powerful enough weapon, but you could keep on shooting a monster with a normal weapon until it gibbed. Given the habit of some monsters to get off several last shots after being taken down, a good number of players consider gibbing standard procedure for dealing with downed mooks.
 * Happens to everyone in Quake III Arena. Played with in that one of the available characters is a skeleton, which causes the game manual to wonder where all the gibs and blood comes from.
 * In Quake III Arena, characters get gibbed if the killing attack had caused a lot more damage than it took to bring down his health to zero (in other words, well into the "negative health"). In fact, you could shoot corpses and cause them to gib in this manner.
 * Unreal Tournament takes this to ridiculous extremes with Instagib mode: Every combatant is armed with a shock rifle that shoots colour-coded laser beams that make players explode instantly into a shower of bloody chunks, "one shot, one kill"-style. Some user-made mutators (like "Gibalicious") increase the amount of gibs produced, possibly up to the point where the computer bogs down from the sheer number of gibs.
 * Also in UT, there is the Moregore mutator, which also produces more gibs, but has a ridiculous side effect, where you headshot someone and 3 heads fly in various directions!
 * A server-side mod for Counter-Strike allowed for some extremely over-the-top gibbing. If, for example, you shoot someone with an AWP, you can see a fountain of blood coming out from the place where he was standing, all of that as you see his body torn to pieces!
 * Who needs mods? Just grab a shotgun, get close to the enemy, and score a direct headshot on someone without a helmet. Viola! Plenty of salsa for the next party (quite chunky of course)! Slightly less over the top, but still silly, is the fact that players without a helmet lose more blood then what should ever be in a human's head from something like a 9mm bullet, or even a knife slash. Not stab. Slash.
 * This tends to happen because the game is programmed to show more blood if someone is shot in the head.
 * BioShock (series) features, among other things, an enemy teleportation effect, where a foe will spontaneously burst into a cloud of aerosolized blood and flying bits of bone... and then the effect reverses itself nearby, blood and bits flying together and reforming as a foe.
 * If you see the houdini splicers in water, you realize that it's not teleportation: it's invisibility. You can see their footsteps in bodies of water in Arcadia. I don't know what the red puff is, but the scraps are usually leaves or some other forest life.
 * Borderlands embraces this. If you go back 10 levels and use a powerful weapon, the enemies will explode into gore, blood and random body parts.
 * Doesn't help that
 * Half-Life 1 was known for this, though not so much in the sequel. However, a third party mod known simply as "SMOD" took this to healthy levels (at least with "gore_moregore 2" on). Shoot a person in the head? A three second long spray of blood... twice. Somebody hits something going too fast? They explode. Vaporization? What was already a mesmerizing particle effect climaxes with them popping like a grape. And those invincible NPCs? Oh you better believe they were solely for target practice.
 * Although Half-Life 2 mostly avoids this, shooting Antlions with a revolver or shotgun causes it to explode.
 * Mass Effect tends to avoid actual bloodshed, but certain ammunition types have disturbing effects on slain enemies. Incendiary and explosive rounds cause them to vanish in a cloud of glowing ash, while proton rounds make their victims disappear in a cloud of ionized gas and electricity. Chemical, radioactive, and polonium rounds make enemies melt into puddles of green goo, and cryo rounds make victims ice over, followed by them inexplicably exploding a couple of seconds later.
 * The books, on the other hand love to go into detail how even normal ammo renders a victims body even minor wounds turn limbs into "hamburger meat"
 * The sequel has a lot more blood, revealing to us that Krogan and Collector blood is orange-brown, Salarian blood is green, and Asari blood is dark purple; for some reason Turians and Batarians retain red blood (Except for Garrus, who somehow bleeds dark blue blood). Geth also spew white lubricants when hit.
 * This occurs in the first game, though not as much. Krogan and Geth enemies do occasionally squirt bright orange and white. And when
 * The mop is definitely needed in Mass Effect 3. Reaper forces tend to be rather messy when killed, and headshooting with pistols, sniper rifles, or shotguns tend to result in reducing the target's head to salsa. And should you overkill with an explosive of some manner, their entire body is reduced to gibs.
 * In Team Fortress 2, the Soldier, Demoman and Engineer classes can make their opponents explode into a shower of blood and body parts (with their rockets, grenades, and a fully upgraded sentry gun's missiles respectively). The postmortem death cam helpfully identifies the gib bits with nametags like "your head", "a bit of you" and "another bit of you." The "birthday" mode that can be turned on by the server operator results in some of the gibs looking like presents, party hats, and...chicken legs. This is taken Up to Eleven with 'sillygibs,' a mod that, when enabled, turns regular gibs into completely random (and obviously silly) objects such as wooden horses, rubber duckies, unicycle wheels, cogs, springs, hamburgers, license plates, etc., etc., etc. Literally ludicrous gibs.
 * Moreover, in the game's early design stages the game was supposed to have a Claymation-inspired graphical style, which would have resulted in enemy corpses blowing up into chunks of plasticine.
 * The post-death camera even labels your exploded body parts (Your Head! Your Foot! Your Pancreas!). Getting killed by an explosive crit (Demoman grenades, stickes, and Soldier crockets) results in you becoming a red splatter on the ground. The death-cam still tries to identify parts (A bit of you! Another bit of you!)
 * Return to Castle Wolfenstein, running on the Quake III engine, has this when using rocket launchers, explosives and a BFG (the player character can also be gibbed, especially by Demonic Spiders with rockets). Zombie enemies can also explode when defeated, but without blood.
 * In the Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo, Wolfenstein, gibs are not quite as prevalent, due to the change in engines. However, the Queen Geist and (both of whom are bosses) still explode in a shower of blood and fleshy chunks when defeated.
 * In Time Splitters: Future Perfect, shooting someone enough with the Injector will result in them swelling up then exploding. If it happens to you, you get treated to your view stretching before the inevitable happens. Using it on the mutants in story mode causes them to leap up then explode.
 * Turok and its sequels are some of the bloodiest N64 games ever, and also brought us the most demented weapon ever: the Cerebral Bore. It shoots out a flying drill which seeks out brainwaves and does precisely what its name implies. It explodes afterward, just for that added touch.
 * Also, there's a gun that shot mines which would jump up and cut enemies' legs off, which actually showed bits of bone poking through the flesh.
 * The 2008 Turok game lets you blow up certain dinosaurs with explosives. The kicker is that their severed bloodied body parts twitch like mad on the ground before going lifeless.
 * All over the place in Painkiller. The titular weapon is like a food blender pumped up on steroids and evil, so the results are predictably gory. A shotgun blast can reduce a foe to chunks. Freezing enemies and then shattering them would break them apart. It doesn't stop there.
 * Call of Duty: World At War appears like this, at least in comparison to the relatively tame gore of past titles. However, it's actually done in a way that kinda makes sense (e.g., don't expect to see any Ludicrous Gibs unless you're using the MG-42, a shotgun at point-blank, or the PTRS-41.) Still quite messy, though. Black Ops follows the same formula, though, tragically, enemies' heads can no longer be exploded. It's perhaps made up for by the fact that even the lightest of light machines guns (like the 5.56mm Stoner 63 or the 5.45mm RPK) can now blow off limbs with the right aim.
 * The Nazi Zombies mode has plenty of gibbing. On Der Riese, when camping the catwalk, zombie corpses will slide back down the stairs when killed but gibbed body parts will not. This results in a heap of corpses at the bottom of the stairs, while the steps are littered with liberal amounts of dismembered hands and feet. Amusing and disturbing.
 * Serious Sam had an option to provide "hippy" blood. The gibs from exploded monsters include apples, oranges, bananas, etc.
 * The HD Updated Rerelease not only is Bloodier and Gorier, you can do this too. Plus carve up corpses with your knife should you feel inclined to.
 * Deus Ex and its mod, The Nameless Mod. While rocket launchers and explosives are generally expected to blow people apart, poke at a body long enough, and it will explode in a mess of guts and gore, even if you do it with a weak weapon. Some of the new weapons in The Nameless Mod continue to follow this trope to a T.
 * Since most of the augmented enemies - MiBs, WiBs, Agents Hermann and Navarre - have self-destruct devices that go off when their health reaches Critical Existence Failure, Ludicrous Gibs feature prominently in their death animations.
 * While the original Left 4 Dead is quite mild about this by today's standards, Left 4 Dead 2 turned the gibs up a couple notches.
 * To clarify, look at how the zombies are killed with the Pipe Bomb. In Left 4 Dead, they explode into a cloud of red mist. In the sequel, their body parts are blown apart and their intestines fly out as the bodies are ragdolled into the air. The guns themselves can gib zombies like there's no tomorrow. Depending on the gun used and what area of a zombie you shoot, you can expose their bones, make their intestines fall out, or even expose their spinal column. Oddly, the special infected do not present these properties.
 * A new gametype was recently introduced in Left 4 Dead 2: Gib-Fest. All players have M60 machine guns with unlimited ammo. It's...spectacular.
 * The Explosive/Frag Ammo bumps up the gibbing to new levels. A stray bullet from this ammo type will SHRED common infected to pieces.
 * The otherwise unremarkable shooter Conspiracy: Weapons of Mass Destruction has a post-game cheat that lets players punch enemies until they explode into burning gibs. This is presumably worth the price of admission in itself.
 * In Red Faction 2 there is a that makes all shots on infantry a one hit kill, with lots of gibs and if you shot a friendly NPC with a LMG, you get lots and lots of gibs, and there is no friendly fire.... Priceless!!
 * Strife, being the last game using the Doom engine, makes use of this trope. In addition, it provided special, gib-like animations for enemies that were immolated by your flame weapons or disintegrated by your Disintegrator Ray.
 * An add-on for Garrys Mod combines this with Overdrawn At the Blood Bank to produce outstanding results. A sample.
 * In E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, large-caliber weapons will cause enemies to explode into a fine red mist. The Damocles will cause enemies to explode, sending body parts flying.

Hack and Slash

 * Diablo II has any monster with the 'Fire Enchanted' trait promptly cover a decent amount of the ground with themselves upon death. This gets especially silly with the boss of the Flayer Dungeon, as you have to defeat him twice and has Fire Enchanted in both forms. Necromancers can do this to nearly any dead enemy with Raise Skeleton (Mage) or Corpse Explosion, as well.
 * Some monsters also break into gibs upon a normal sword-bashing death. It's funny to cast the resurrection spell with a necromancer on them and watch the death animation play backwards. Gibs fly into the air and connect with each other, forming a fully functional undead monster.
 * Interestingly, if one kills a swarm of locusts and attempts to raise a skeleton from the "corpse", the same bloody explosion will occur and produce a perfect human skeleton complete with weapon
 * If you kill an enemy skeleton, you can cast the raise-skeleton spell on it, but first it too must explode in a shower of blood and gory effluence
 * Aah, Corpse Explosion. Blow up a tiny Leaper or Fetish and get a blood fountain as glorious as if you'd blown up an entire Blood Maggot. A dry, fleshless Skeleton Warrior? Gibs aplenty. That one little animation, illogical as it may be, provides so much catharsis.
 * Many of the Druid's powers explode corpses too... carrion vines and solar creepers, for example, but also summoned Dire Wolves who always appreciate a quick snack and are apparently very messy eaters.
 * Diablo III promises this trope in spades. Any enemy killed with a critical hit will explode (and the gibs themselves will be on fire/frozen/glowing with magic energy depending on damage type), all Unique monsters will explode when killed, some breeds of monsters explode no matter what... etc. This feature was so popular that shortly after the game's unveiling, Blizzard gave in to fan's demand that corpses stop fading away, just so they could see the aftermath.
 * On the subject, the Monk has a technique called Exploding Palm - enemies struck by this explode when killed by DOT. Omae wa mo shinderu...
 * Diablo-clone Torchlight also has enemies exploding into crimson showers on critical-hit induced deaths, and sometimes just normal deaths, as well as sporting a gib-related Steam achievement.
 * Magicka is rife with this, most notably when killing things with the Arcane element, but also after lightning strikes, being too close to explosives, running into grinders, etc.

Light Gun Game

 * In the arcade rail shooter Carn Evil, damn near everything gibs but the skeletons at the end. This is especially fun when it takes more than one shot to take an enemy down.
 * The arcade Light Gun Game Friction has enemies occasionally explode into pieces upon being shot. There's no blood though, giving the impression that the enemies are made of glass.
 * On the other hand, Beast Busters and Zombie Raid went in the other direction. Dispatch any enemy in Beast Busters—even the normal zombie goons that can be dispatched with just one or two bullets—and they'll explode into lots of tattered pieces. Not much in the way of blood though, other than presumably-clotted blood. Meanwhile, Zombie Raid has a lot of not just zombies, but also werewolves, gargoyles, and ordinary human grave robbers. One rifle bullet more than suffices to turn a grave robber's upper body into an erupting mess of sinew. With no trace left of the erupting area's skin or clothing. Bosses, however, tend not to break apart; they just disappear in a mass of flames.

MMORPGs

 * Two quests in World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King involve collecting meat. One requires throwing high explosives at mammoths, the other requires throwing them into giant worms.
 * Even more ludicrously, Death Knights who specialize in the Unholy aspect of their class receive the gruesome attack "Corpse Explosion", which does exactly what you'd expect. Not only does this result in weaponized ludicrous gibs, you can enhance the ability so that if it kills an enemy it makes them explode in a chain reaction.
 * Multiboxed Deathknights, surrounded by a large grouping of corpses (which is extremely common as multiboxed Deathknights are painful), who have the enhanced ability are simply unreal. We're talking ludicrous instagibbing to the fiftieth power.

Platform Game

 * Whenever The Kid dies in the freeware Metroidvania game I Wanna Be the Guy (and trust us when we say he will die...very often), he explodes into little 8-bit giblets, even for something as minor as touching the edge of a spike pit, or getting hit by a falling apple.
 * They're really more like giant cherries...
 * If a single pixel of your gun occupies the same place as a single pixel of a spike or apple... You explode. Across a quarter of the screen. With probably a dozen times the pixels that actually compose your avatar in the first place.
 * One aversion exists. If the Kid gets drained by a Metroid, he doesn't gib- he turns into brown dust and blows away. This is just as annoying as a normal death, however.
 * In Jump'n Bump, you and other players control adorable little bunnies which will explode into fountains of blood and gibs as you stomp on each other.
 * The old PC game Biomenace.
 * The original Japanese Rockman Zero games include quick bursts of blood when Zero destroys certain enemies with the sabre. Why are these gibs ludicrous? Because every enemy in the game is a robot.
 * Technically justified as the enemies are Ridiculously-Human Robots. It's not blood, it's a blood-like substance. Censorially removed in the American release.
 * Except, bizarrely, in the intro cutscene for the first game.
 * Mega Man ZX Advent takes it further, with a charged buster shot blowing huge holes in a dead enemy's torso.
 * Oddworld: Munch's Oddysey had enemies (and allies) bursting into what appeared to be fried drumsticks when thrown into a meat grinder or if a weaker one had been possessed.
 * In the later levels of the cutesy freeware platformer Eversion,.
 * In Tomb Raider: Underworld, hitting zombies with the hammer turns them into a rain of limbs (and heads and torsoes). Sometimes the only thing keeping them from flying into outer space is the ceiling.
 * In Conkers Bad Fur Day you can explode enemies into bloody bits with the rocket launcher, take off somebody's head or just chunks of it with a few different kinds of guns, and slice torsos in half with the katana and chainsaw. For maximum overkill and hilarity if you kill somebody with the rocket launcher in the cramped hallways of the Heist multiplayer mode bloody guts will stick to and drip from the ceiling and walls, and the weasels will even comment on the gore. "What a f$@&ing mess!"
 * Splosion Man emphasises "ludicrous". The bodies of hapless scientists explode into showers of deli meats like steak and legs of ham.
 * The protagonist in Stealth Bastard dies in a gory fashion.

Real Time Strategy

 * In the Warhammer 40000 RTS Dawn of War, units in melee can perform sync kills on other units, which are often bloody and gory. Of special note are the Ork Warboss' sync kill against most infantry units, where he grabs the unit in his claw and smashes it against the ground head-first as though a particularly angry child, and most of the Dreadnought sync kills, one of which involve grabbing the enemy in a claw and blasting it with a flamethrower, another of which appears to show the Dreadnought blending the unfortunate enemy. Add in that shooting enemies causes blood and gibs to fly out as well, and battlefields can get quite bloody.
 * That last instance is definitely an example of the trope: large blobs of blood and organs will fly out of a corpse when they die, but the corpse itself remains completely whole as it falls to the ground, making one wonder where all those chunks of meat actually came from. Ludicrous indeed.
 * Rectified in the sequel, where powerful attacks can literally shred the enemies into pieces.
 * In Starcraft, the Zerg - perhaps out of jealousy at the Terran and Protoss tendency to explode when something looks at them funny - generally explode in a shower of blood when killed, including buildings. Their buildings also bleed when damaged.

Real Time Tactics

 * Bungie's Myth series of RTT games had hunks of blood and gore flying off melee'd opponents and staining the landscape wherever the physics engine had them bounce (with limbs and heads also flying everywhere upon most deaths), high explosives causing victims to be blown to dozens of bloody bits, putrid hunks of pus falling from the undead, and a special unit (the ghol) which would pick up these things to be used as weapons.
 * As a matter of fact, ALL of Bungie's pre-Oni games were absurdly bloody, with explosions actually liquefying those caught in most blasts.
 * Liero takes this to a ridiculous extreme by having a giblets setting. If it's high enough, even lightly wounded characters will leave a bloody mess just by walking. This can be kind of strange if you've chosen, say, an ant as your character skin.
 * Fat Princess has quite a bit of gore and blood, despite the fact that everything else is rather cutesy. The characters resemble the humans in Animal Crossing but when they die there are huge puddles of blood.

Roguelike

 * Dwarf Fortress is surprisingly gory for an ASCII-based game. The game's health system is very in-depth, keeping track of every part of every character's body down to eyes, internal organs, and individual fingers and toes. Gibs, represented as red 2s (or green, or grey, depending on whether it bleeds blood or goo), will litter the surrounding environment if enemies are dismembered, disemboweled, hacked in two, or thrown into a wall with enough force to blow apart. It gets even better in adventure mode, which lets you take control of a single adventurer. This mode includes a blow-by-blow account of every fight, and the ability to pick up and throw the severed bits of enemies (or anything else, for that matter). Thrown objects—even socks, or small fluffy animals—will often hit with deadly force, breaking bones, damaging organs, or splattering brains across the floor. Ludicrous gibs indeed.
 * It's not unheard of for outside-the-fortress battles in DF to involve goblin limbs ending up in trees. And then there's the aforementioned "thrown into a wall" example, in which parts can go several vertical levels above the original goblin. That's taller than the tree he hit.
 * A large group of creatures dropped from a great heigh into a pit can create a wondrous geyser of gore rivaling that of the well scene from Army of Darkness. As demonstrated here.
 * Now have fun having all your dwarves murder your FPS via pathfinding to retrieve all the body parts...also, hope you've got like fifty butcher's workshops set up. At least.

Role Playing Game
"In addition, there's the high-level perk Sniper: Luck stat * 10 = critical hit chance. In other words, with 10 luck all your shots become crits, generally resulting in one of the animations described above. Damage per shot becomes less important than the sheer number of shots fired, resulting in situations in which spraying a group of opponents from one of the weak submachineguns causes most of them to instantly explode into fleshy chunks."
 * The first two Fallout games rewarded the player with extra gruesome death animations that would play some of the time if the player inflicted a large amount of damage in a single attack. If one gave the player character the special trait "Bloody Mess" during creation, the most spectacular death animations would always play when an enemy died. The full list of splattery animations is:
 * Shot or stabbed to death: A large hole appears in the target's torso.
 * Machinegun Mayhem: The body is split into tiny pieces by the bullets, and only the legs and lower torso remain.
 * Melted Alive: Plasma weapons cause first the target's skin, then the skeleton, to melt into a green puddle.
 * Laser Cut: Laser weapons and the solar scorcher cause a clean cut in the middle of the target's torso, separating the target in two.
 * Crispy Critter: Flamethrowers cause the target to burst into flame. Also known as the "Burning Bitch Dance".
 * Electrified: Pulse weapons and the alien blaster cause the target to light up in an electric blast and vaporize into thin air. (This usually isn't as good, as it causes lootable items to fall on the ground, so that they must be picked up one by one.)


 * Graphical technology not advanced enough? That wasn't enough to stop Fallout's predecessor! Wasteland featured such lines as "Rabbit is reduced to a thin red paste" and "Thug explodes like a blood sausage".
 * Fallout 3 ups the antes where Bloody Mess will sometimes cause surreal ludicrous gibs. Like firing a 10mm pistol once at a Super Mutant's torso (Super Mutants are big, hulk-like mutants) only to watch his arms, legs and head rip from his body (in slow motion!) from the force of the hit. And that can happen with the weakest gun in the game.
 * Also, there is the Rock-It Launcher, which lets you shoot random junk at guys. So you can make an enormous super mutant master explode into its various component parts by shooting it with oh, say, a plastic car. Or a teddy bear.
 * Or those old books you find everywhere. Behold the power of reading!
 * Or old, pre-war paper money. Decapitations and other forms of dismemberment are ridiculously common even without the Bloody Mess perk anyways. The body part you land the killing blow on will almost always fall off. If you get a critical hit with the Plasma Rifle, you can see the head fly away even while it and the rest of the body is collapsing into goo. Not to mention the Railway Rifle, which shoots railway spikes that pins such a flying body part to any nearby wall. Finally you've got the two-headed Brahmin cows, where shooting one head off inexplicably causes the other one to fall off as well.
 * Ctrl Alt Del pokes "fun" at this tendency here and here.
 * If you enjoy hacking, you can put Liberty Prime's Liberty Laser into your weapons inventory. At 1200 strength, it's about 20 times stronger than the strongest normal weapon in the game. This basically means that not only will anything you point it at instantly die, they will also turn into a giant mass of flying red chunks that shoot out for miles across the map.
 * Bloody Mess is back for Fallout: New Vegas, along with a host of new weapons. Notable entries include the Red Glare (full-auto rocket launcher), Ballistic Fist (power fist with a sawed-off shotgun mounted on it), chainsaw, and Two-Step Goodbye (a Ballistic Fist with a rocket launcher instead of a shotgun), which has the listed effect "Critical Kill = BOOM!"
 * Wizardry 8 has this, even though it makes absolutely no sense. It's medieval fantasy, mostly medieval weaponry (aside from some guns and explosives), but there are maybe three or four enemies that don't explode when killed. Still, it's a great game, so gibbing a rat by stabbing it with a knife is a minor slight.
 * Dungeon Siege 2 does this, despite being medieval fantasy. Gibbing seems to occur if enough damage is done to push an enemy over a certain point of negative health, most likely a percentage, they will explode violently into pieces, flying every which way. While it might make sense for some of the power attacks, which deal huge damage and have effects that would warrant a violent mess, seeing an enemy explode into fragments from a single quarrel to the chest is rather absurd. The fact that every party member is usually capable of making enemies into such a mess at the same point, this can lead to some very interesting times when leading a powerful team up against a small army of inferior enemies.
 * The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion features a spell called Enemies Explode. It wasn't until a combat mod (Deadly Reflexes if memory serves) was released that featured a revamped system of combat complete with dismemberments and various other fatal effects where a spell was included that achieves just such an effect.
 * Baldurs Gate, on the Core Rules difficulty, causes anyone who is killed with massive damage (i.e. reducing them to -10 hit points with a single blow) to explode into pieces, preventing any possibility of resurrection.
 * Scoring kills with a Critical Hit in Baldurs Gate 2 will reduce the unfortunate victim to a shower of Chunky Salsa Rule, which has the side-effect of requiring True Resurrection in place of the simpler Raise Dead for Player Characters so slain.
 * Jade Empire has a couple- some of the Harmonic Combinations result in an enormous cloud of red, and it's extremely gratifying to see the ridiculous blood-fountain that occasionally results from slaying an enemy with basic sword attacks.
 * In an (in-engine) cutscene, the use of the rifle Mirabelle causes someone to explode into bloody chunks if gore is turned on. It's a good weapons, but not that good!
 * Dragon Age: Origins features a spell for mages (magi?) called "Walking Bomb" to cast on unfortunate enemies. Fun to use.
 * There is also the "decapitation" death animation that sometimes happens when you are using a sword. What was once your enemy is now a brief but spectacular blood fountain.
 * Gibbing is used much more in Dragon Age II, as default enemy death results in gibbing. It literally happens all the time in ordinary combat; i.e. stabbing an enemy to death with an ordinary dagger will cause an enemy to literally explode in a burst of limbs blood and guts.
 * Neverwinter Nights has the "Destruction" spell, which destroys most targets with a cloud of blood and imploding gibs, even if it's an object, such as a door or crate. This spell can also be applied (up to level 40) to gloves (punch the enemy/object for gibs), weapons (hit the enemy/object for gibs), and armor (get hit to gib the enemy).
 * The Epic Feat Devastating Critical does the same to anyone hit by said Criticals (And bear in mind that NWN deviates from standard 3.0 D&D in terms of limiting the range of rolls that will generate a critical, so it could be as high as 1 critical per 2 swings). Doing enough damage to destroy an object will smash it into flinders, as above. This gets truly ridiculous when you have say, a halfling barbarian, wielding a dagger, destroying what appears to be an iron-bound chest...
 * This is also what happens to Mooks nine times out of ten if you turn the game's gore setting all the way up. Fight undead using a cleric or paladin, and Hilarity Ensues.

Shoot'Em Up

 * The original NARC arcade game. Blast an enemy with explosives, and watch the graphically detailed gibs fly.
 * Even the NES version got this past the radar. Then again, with all the other filth in the game, it's a wonder Nintendo approved it at all.
 * Xop and Xop Black. You can actually adjust the level of it, which affects the flaming explosions in case of robotic enemies and the amount of Alien Blood in case of everything else, all the way to, well "ludicrous". At that level dying organic level bosses release so much internal fluids that the screen doesn't have enough space to show it all, and it can even obscure the enemy fire.
 * In the 0.95 version of Hellsinker this would happen if you got hit.

Survival Horror

 * Justified in Dead Space: it's all about blowing off the enemies' limbs because headshots don't work.
 * In Resident Evil 4, when you shoot an enemy in the head and kill it, its head explodes—a bit over-the-top, but not totally unreasonable. Where it gets truly ridiculous is that the same thing happens if you kill them by kicking them.
 * Possibly justified in that most enemies's heads aren't exactly solid anymore.
 * When you kill a Regenerator, it explodes wetly from the waist up.

Third-Person Shooter

 * The Crusader games had, in addition to relatively Standard FPS Guns, also some outlandish weapons with gruesome effects.
 * The plasma rifle launched a ball of blue plasma about the size of a fist that enveloped and instantaneously vaporized the victim (rather than just burning a hole the size of the projectile).
 * The "ultraviolet gun" burned the flesh off the victim in a couple of seconds, leaving a rather gruesome skeleton with some scraps of meat still remaining.
 * There was a freeze gun from which the hapless enemy could literally be shattered in a hundred pieces.
 * One used Nanomachines or similar Phlebotinum to reduce the target to a pile of goo.
 * There's also the microwave projector "gun" in No Regret, which zapped the victim with enough microwave radiation to not only kill them, but also boil all the moisture in their body at once, making them explode in a steam-filled cloud of cooked flesh...
 * Gears of War, a manly game for real men, is known for its famous chainsaw bayonet, which neatly slices Locust into various limbs amidst showers of blood that coat the screen and, yes, even impair the player's vision through sheer ludicrousness. A well-aimed headshot yields fountains of alien juice and ambiguous blobs of flesh spraying copiously from the neck, and, if timed correctly, a blow to the face can completely sever the cranium.
 * The gibbing really comes out with shotguns or anything that explodes. Most notably, a well-placed shot from the boomshot can sometimes result in dismembered limbs flying 30+ feet in the air.
 * Warhammer 40000 Space Marine does this a lot, unsurprising since you're hitting people with explosive bullets and chainsaw swords with the default weapon.
 * In Mass Effect 3, headshots with a sufficiently powerful weapon will now cause this. There's also the ability "Carnage", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Turn Based Tactics

 * In Jagged Alliance 2, a head shot from close range sometimes causes the enemy's head to burst apart, releasing a gush of High-Pressure Blood from the neck stump. A close-range chest impact could cause a similar burst of blood to fly from the back of the enemy (or even one of your own mercs or NPCs) as the unfortunate victim was flung about 1,5 meters backwards. Also, grenades or mortar rounds could turn people into (briefly) living torches.
 * Oddly enough, though, said grenades or mortar rounds didn't cause ludicrous gibs, when they ever actually killed anyone.
 * Every kill in Vandal Hearts results in a high-powered geyser of blood erupting from the victim. Even skeletons. The only exceptions are mechanical enemies and living statues, who die with a high-powered geyser of...gravel?

Wide Open Sandbox

 * Scarface the World Is Yours had a sniper rifle, shotgun, carbine and a Desert Eagle capable of dismembering foes. Of course, there's the chainsaw too.
 * Every time you kill someone in No More Heroes, they explode into a huge shower of blood. The game was pre-emptively censored by the developers for Japan and Europe, with the splatter replaced by an explosion of black pixels and coins raining down, which still kind of fits the mood in an old-school arcade game kind of way.
 * Cortex Command takes great pride in this, to an almost ridiculous point. Though crashes and explosions cause gibs, of course, just falling a little too far is liable to break off a leg.
 * Not to mention rocket and dropship engines, which in earlier versions would tear anybody under them to shreds. While they merely push actors now, dropship engines, when shot in the right place, will break off from the ship and go flying in whatever direction they please, often turning soldiers into red mist. The dropship doors are worse, though; they have a reputation for always finding troops after the ship explodes.
 * The dropship itself, after one or both engines are damaged/blown off, drops to the ground and either explodes outright or waits a while and then does. When troops are nearby, the resulting cloud of rapidly expanding shrapnel has the tendency of going from metal-gray to blood-red very quickly.
 * Some weapons are meant to be fired from huge mech actors, but can be equipped to any actor. If someone too small fires the weapon, it's liable to have enough recoil to make them explode.
 * Destroy All Humans! and its sequel see the Mooks incinerated in a flash of yellow embers when killed with the Disintegrator Ray. Vehicles simply explode.
 * Prototype's Alex Mercer is incredibly strong, but his punches usually just blows the enemy across the street, until you add the Muscle Mass ability. Then, everyone you hit blows into meaty chunks and the vehicles explode.
 * Terraria has every living thing in it explode into a few bloody chunks when it dies, no matter what killed them. Thus, blood moons and goblin invasions tend to make a big mess when you're done. It's kind of mitigated by the art style, though.

Anime and Manga

 * Late in Shikabane Hime, Hokuto punches someone so hard they turn into red mist and leave nothing but their kimono floating off in the wind. Noteworthy for being a case of "slapping into a red mist" not being hyperbole.
 * Full-body explosion is the fate of more than a few of Kenshiro's enemies in Fist of the North Star. You Are Already Dead, indeed.

Fan Works

 * Lots and lots in Poke Wars, as a result of the removal of the dampeners keeping Pokemon attacks from being lethal.
 * What happens to a Scyther in New World after encountering Mewtwo.
 * Happens to Matt in Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami.

Film
"K: Oh, you've got some entrails on you."
 * The 2008 Rambo film is packed with ludicrous amounts of gore. Which is fine when an anti-aircraft gun is being used, less so when even a mere rifle shot turns limbs into doom-esque fountains of blood and bone fragments!
 * Not as unrealistic you may think and actually more truth than gore for gore's sake. The sniper for example is using a .50 caliber rifle originally designed to take out armored vehicles and aircraft! As disgusting as it seems, that's what happens to the human body when high-caliber (even regular 5.56 or 7.62) rifle rounds hit it.
 * The weapon in question used the same ammo as the gun that Rambo was using.
 * Saving Private Ryan. Though the carnage is realistic, there is one scene that applies for this trope, where a man needs to put a "sticky bomb" on the wheels of a tank. And the bomb explodes before he does it.
 * Lets not forget the 20mm Ack Ack gun in that village.
 * Army of Darkness. At one point, a human is dragged into a pit by a monster. For best results, bear in mind at this point that the human body contains about 5 litres of blood. Now watch as a geyser of blood blasts out of the pit.
 * Predated by A Nightmare on Elm Street when Johnny Depp's character bites it—he is sucked into a waterbed and a geyser of blood comes out from it. Perhaps somewhat Justified Trope because we're dealing with Freddy Krueger here; if he wants you to have more blood, you're damn well going to.
 * When Lt. Thompson arrives at the scene, he asks where the coroner is and gets the response "He's been in the John puking since he saw it."
 * Blade II. A bomb designed to go on the back of the head to control an adversary goes off, completely disintegrating the entity, leaving nothing but a fine red mist. Granted, it was at waist level, but not even a shoelace was left.
 * District 9. In amid all the totally serious, gritty Apartheid metaphors are a bunch of alien weapons that can do all kinds of fantastically gory things to a body. It's horrifying at first, and then it's just awesome: they explode into tiny little pieces that litter the landscape. From a single shot from a man-portable small arm that can be held in one hand if need be. Which possibly doesn't need reloading. The first time you see one used, the recipient splatters across the main character's face. It's actually a funny spot, which is needed considering the darkness of the movie.
 * The infamous "cat scene" in The Boondock Saints. Dictated by Rule of Funny—a cat with a hole in it, or even blown in half, is sad. A cloud of flying meat? Crosses the Line Twice.
 * What the fuck happened to that guy's head?
 * Watchmen. Dr Manhattan kills people by exploding their body splattering everyone nearby with flesh and bones.
 * Tremors: Graboids + bombs = raining gibs.
 * Tremors 2: Shrieker + .55 cal anti-tank rifle with solid bronze bullet = splattered shrieker. Also, shriekers + 2.5 tons of high explosives = raining gibs.
 * Tremors 3: Ass Blasters + spear + cannon fuse = raining gibs.
 * Tremors 4: Graboid + traction engine + big hook and belt = raining gibs.
 * Are we seeing a pattern, here?
 * More like a Running Gag, as the characters are usually spattered with the aforementioned gibs.
 * The most famous scene in David Cronenberg "Body Horror? Yes Please!" Cronenberg's Scanners involves two men in an auditorium engaged in a sort of psychic duel: the loser's head explodes in a torrent of blood and pulpy meat.
 * Weapons used in Men in Black actually go so far into the ludicrous department it's no longer grotesque. The aliens simply explode into slime, which is less disgusting than gibs and less disturbing than gutted bodies.


 * In order to emulate the comic series on which is was based, gibs were used in Sin City to the point where simple punches and kicks would result in a big, sloppy gush of blood. It matches the over-the-top nature of the comic series.
 * Tron: Legacy: Sure, it's technically the computerized form of blood, but the majority of program deaths have them dying in a graphic spray of voxels.
 * Seen in the first film as well, when Tron gets a Boom! Headshot! on Sark.
 * In Centurion, a Pict is thrown head first into a tree. His head explodes.
 * Kill Bill- Boss Tanaka, in what can only be described as a fountain of blood. High-Pressure Blood doesn't begin to describe it. Most of O-Ren's story is somewhat like this.
 * RoboCop has the scene where one of Bodikker's flunkies gets dosed in toxic waste. As he shambles about the factory, begging for help, he gets hit by a speeding Bodikker. His body bursts the same way a water balloon would.
 * Not quite "gibs," but there's also the OCP executive chosen to demonstrate ED-209's capabilities. He gets riddled with hundreds of bullets before someone finally pulls the plug.

Literature

 * In the Dale Brown novels Fatal Terrain and Warrior Class, an aircrewman is shredded by a fighter's cannon and a triple-A emplacement, both firing 23mm rounds, respectively. In Strike Force,, his Motion Capture Mecha already severely damaged by anti-tank missiles, is put down for good by 30mm cannon.
 * The Halo novel Contact Harvest introduces the M99 Stanchion, a coilgun sniper rifle capable of inducing this trope on anyone it hits. Considering it fires a .21-cal round at 15 kilometers per second, the gory effects are realistic/expected.
 * Played straight in Calvin and Hobbes of all places. Calvin is making a traffic safety poster with the slogan "Be Careful or Be Roadkill!" We never see the finished result, but he states that he hopes he has enough red crayon, and later mentions that he splattered the whole thing with chunky spaghetti sauce so that not only would it look real, it would attract flies.
 * In last book of the third series of Warrior Cats, Hollyleaf falls in rage and shreds mouse to pieces, until all that remains of it is described as red pulp.
 * Mack Maloney's Wingman series of pulp novels often included descriptions of what happens when the pilot of a plane (or an unfortunate soldier on the ground) is even clipped by a 20mm round from a Vulcan gun. Considering that Hawk Hunter has six of them mounted on his F-16, they don't fare well.

Live Action TV

 * An episode of CSI: Miami features a man whose gun has about a bajillion barrels mounted in the approximate shape of a human body. He calls it the Vaporizer. Its effect on a human body is, well....
 * Special Effects Failure? Conspicuous CGI?
 * But apparently, it just takes the one.
 * Now as seen in Minecraft!
 * On Supernatural, when an angel attempted to fight an archangel, bystanders ended up picking bits of the unfortunate angel  out of their hair.
 * Poor Cas has a habit of this happening to him in season finales. It happened again, this time from Lucifer.
 * Castiel got his revenge, though. In his new role as The Starscream and the new God, he did it to Raphael in the season 6 finale.
 * NCIS
 * Episode 4x07, "Sandblast", a Marine is blown to bits when he triggers an explosion while attempting to knock his golf-ball out of a sand trap.
 * Inverted Trope, to no small extent, in Dexter - the main plot kicks off with a neatly-dissected corpse with no blood whatsoever. The protagonist is utterly shocked... and impressed.
 * In Farscape, early attempts by Scorpius at manned wormhole travel leave the unlucky pilots oozing out of their cockpits in the form of red sludge.
 * In the Torchwood mini-series Children of Earth, enemy operatives plant a bomb in Captain Jack Harkness. Jack becomes chunky salsa dip. Then, since Jack is a fixed point in time and space, he is graphically depicted pulling himself back together.
 * True Blood vampires explode into blood and guts with no skeleton or anything that looks like an actual vital organ, when they are staked or decapitated. They look like bloody water balloons.

Tabletop Games

 * There's an example in Dark Heresy's Critical Damage tables, where the developers took what looks to me like a disturbing amount of glee in describing, for example, the results of a high-explosive shell to the head. Some damage results can result in other characters being injured by flying shards of bone. This is turned up to Ludicrous Gibs when one considers how Critical Existence Failure works in this game. A starting character can take approximately ten damage before hitting the Critical Damage charts. These charts are rough, but generally survivable, up to roughly 8 points of critical damage. If a starting character is hit with a burst of bolt gunfire for 17 damage, he may be critically injured on the ground. Then when he is punched in the face for two more damage, his head may spontaneously explode, because that's what the Critical Damage Chart says happens.
 * Rogue Trader and Deathwatch, which use the same system, both use the same rules.
 * As does Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, although the lower tech level means that it isn't quite as gory. Still more than qualifies though.
 * Then again, Dark Heresy is set in the Warhammer 40000-verse.
 * So they most certainly took highly disturbing amounts of glee from the description of such.
 * Kind of up to the Game Master, but in Paranoia experimental weapons from R&D quite frequently have ... interesting ... effects upon the target. And the user. And the user's teammates. And, oh, everyone within a half-mile or so. Paranoia is for GMs who like killing player characters, and players who don't mind their characters dying if they can do so in an entertaining way. "I press the red button on the strange black gizmo I got from R&D." "A voice comes from it: 'Tactical Thermonuclear Warhead activated. Detonation in 2 seconds. Have a nice day, Citiz-BOOOOOOM!'"
 * The old Middle Earth Role-Playing Game had some quite... interesting critical hit tables. One for each damage type. They included lines like "The electrical shock vibrates the targets' bones into dust." and "The target is hit in the ear, all the ear-wax runs out."
 * This is true of its parent game Role Master, which featured not only spectacular criticals which would shame Mortal Kombat, but slips on imaginary turtles for the critical fumbles.

Web Comics

 * Belkar Bitterleaf turned his Evil Counterpart (well, Good Counterpart) into a salsa dip after getting a large number of adventurers to gank him. Or at least, cut off his tail and stuck it into a jar of salsa. He also used said kobold's head as a chip bowl.
 * The kobold in question is attempting to avenge his father, whose head ended up as Belkar's hat.
 * In Dominic Deegan, Well-Intentioned Extremist Celesto Morgan's trademark move is to overload people with chaos magic, causing them to explode rather messily in all directions.
 * 's decapitation-by-pineapple in Sarah Zero.
 * The Sacrifice comic on L4D.com features some incredibly over-the-top gibs.

Real Life
""As the Russian lunged with a final deadly thrust, his face passed momentarily into my crosshairs and I fired. The Germany infantryman stared, almost incomprehensibly, at the burst head of the Russian, destroyed by the explosive round. Bone fragments and strips of cerebellum had sprayed the German's face and uniform. The combination of fear and relief at his unexpected salvation seized the man.""
 * During the infamous Byford Dolphin Explosive Decompression accident, one of the divers was sucked through the hatch and "reduced to pot roast".
 * Being sucked into a jet engine.
 * Men have survived that. However, in at least one case, it was because he was wearing a helmet and he still suffered pretty serious injuries as a result.
 * Anyone who has survived it is because the jet engine was shut down before they hit the blades. There are pictures easily searchable on the Internet depicting what happens when the blades are NOT stopped before a person hits them. Search at your own risk, in synopsis, there is nothing left that is easily identifiable as belonging to a human. Nothing.
 * There's a picture that can be found on the internet if one searches the right places that has a man who was shot in the head with a powerful sniper rifle. The rifle in question was a Barret .50 Caliber rifle). Search at your own risk.
 * Although not any less brutal, these images are getting more and more common. Since every rebel on the streets these days has a mobile phone with camera, you can now even see such things on video. It's still not advised to look for it, although news agencies are also showing them more and more often on prime-time tv.
 * Basically, there's a reason why we're called "water sacs" in most fiction. We tend to explode violently.
 * The infamous Exploding Whale incident: To get rid of a rotting whale carcass, the Oregon Highway Department decided the best method would be to blow it up with a half-ton of dynamite and leave the pieces for the birds to eat. The explosion hurled whale chunks as far as 800 feet away, with one chunk caving in the roof of a car.
 * World War II explosive ammo

- Sniper on the Eastern Front describes a sniper with explosive ammo rescuing a German POW from execution