PAIN

When I was younger, I played all sorts of games, from Mario to Rock Band to Halo, and even Superman 64. While I enjoyed a fair amount of the titles I played, the games I had the most fun with were the ones where your character ragdolled all over the place upon death. Yep, I was HUGE into games with physics back then, especially games that used Havok, but as fun as it was watching John-117 ricochet spectacularly between sharp rocks off the side of a cliff, none of those games really captured what ragdoll physics could have accomplished. And then I found PAIN.

Of course, this was during a time that I was devoid of a PS3 and I was slowly shifting my way towards the online gaming crowd, forgetting all about the hilarity I could cause by flinging a player character's body against stuff in the environment. As such, I slowly lost interest, but now that I own a Playstation 3 it instantly shot up to my Most Wanted list. Now that I finally have it, however, I can safely say that I feel entirely ripped off and I wish I never spent any money on it dissatisfied with the amount of content they included with it.

I guess I should start with the basics, since I appear to be getting ahead of myself. PAIN is a game where you take a psychotic lug-nut named Jarvis McBallsy (no, I'm not kidding, that's his actual name) and launch him, from an ostensibly-large slingshot, into whatever unfortunate objects he comes in contact with. The more chaos you bring to the unnamed downtown metropolis, the more you score. Havok showcases its physics in fine quality as always, collapsing mostly anything you come into contact with in a spectacular array of destruction. In the air, you can pull off twisted and crazy stunts using the L1/L2 buttons in correlation with a face button, and grab the environment by pushing X, circle, square, or triangle. After smacking against a solid object, your character goes limp, but you can still push him/her around by using the 'Ooch' feature, which lets you inch your body in a specified direction whenever you tap the D-pad. The controls are quite solid for a ragdoll launching simulation, and the amount of wanton annihilation you can stir up is nearly endless.

The core game also comes with a few extra modes. The default is Paindemonium, which dumps you into the middle of a city and leaves you on your own to destroy whatever you want and rack up as many points as possible. It not only provides gratuitous amounts of fun, but their are also a few different areas you can unlock, so you can wreak mayhem at a different perspective. Mime Toss challenges you to throw everyone's favorite street performer into multiple panes of glass in an allotted amount of time, while Spank the Monkey tasks you with flinging yourself into a bunch of primates in succession, who show up in harder-to-reach spots as you play along. Multiplayer isn't slouchy, either - Fun With Explosives dumps an absurd amount of highly-combustible crates around town, having you destroy as many as you can in one turn. HORSE works just as it always has: The first player throws themselves at any object they choose, and the second player has to hit the same object and score more points that the first player. Fail to do so, and you get a letter. It's easily my favorite multiplayer game, particularly because I get to chain together a large multiplier by throwing a granny into a subway train and watch to see what my opponents come up with out of that. The third is PAIN Bowling, probably one of my favorite iterations of bowling in a video game yet. It works much like its real-life counterpart (besides, you know, using a giant slingshot and live people instead of bowling balls). except the other players can potentially screw the first player up by activating hazards such as a falling girder or a swarm of explosive crates to hinder the current bowler. All of these modes provide a surprisingly nice amount of fun, and the variety of ways to destroy the environment is almost unmatched even by Garry's Mod standards.

But why am I so disdained by this odd little party game? I'll tell you exactly why: It is, without a doubt, the WORST victim of over-saturated downloadable content on the market, nearly giving Horse Armor a run for its money. Do you want to know how much content you get with the 10 dollars you pay for this game? Do you? Well, let's see, including free DLC, you get:

• 6-7 characters, 5 of which are licensed characters from other games/media
• Two stages to play on, one of which is sponsored by AXE Body Wash
• 5 game modes
• Some beta levels used to test stuff being added to the game
• and PlayStation Move/3D support

Really. For 10 bucks, that's how much you get. You know what other games I can pay 10 bucks for and get the same amount of content or more? I could buy Terraria, Psychonauts, Monday Night Combat, Dungeons of Dredmor + The Binding of Isaac, and that's barely scratching the paint. This game has an incredibly goofy and funny premise, yet it all falls flat because Idol Minds got their idle minds wrapped up in greed and released the rest of the characters/stages/game modes as paid DLC (see what I did there).

Now, normally, I wouldn't complain too much about DLC, even if sometimes there is a lot of it, but here, there's absolutely zero excuse for how bad it is. Do you want to play as Flavor Flav, or a cheerleader, or a sexy nurse? That'll run you one/two dollar(s), and I know what you're thinking, "It's only one/two dollar(s)! It can't be that bad, can it?" Well, when your game consists of at least 30 characters, and 6-7 of them are free, that's an extra $30 you have to throw in if you want to play as every other character. And that's not even taking into account the damn stages, which are 6 bucks apiece. Only 2 are unlocked by default, and there are 7 in total, so that's yet ANOTHER $30 more dollars you must pitch out. Then, after that, there's still at least a couple of extra game modes, each priced at around 3 bucks apiece. So if you want the complete, no BS PAIN experience, you need to fork in about $75. That's more than what you would pay for a game like Max Payne 3, for the complete edition of what is essentially a Havok tech demo. Such a cruel, cruel world we live in.

Don't get me wrong, this game can be all sorts of fun. There's not a lot of games on the market that allow you to throw someone into an oncoming freight train and rebound off of a gas tank to tackle a mime, but it's strictly a DLC game. You get what amounts to 15% of the entire game if you pay the flat $10 for it. If you are willing to shell out an extensive amount of dough for DLC, it's worth a try, especially if you have company. For others who don't have a whole lot of cash to spare, then don't bother; your money is better off spent elsewhere.