How was your weekend? How many of you spent time trying to inflict pain on a character in a video game? A game about inflicting pain on your character complete with a band-aid in the logo? How about slingshotting “yourself” into some over-sized bowling pins? Bowling over mimes? Yes, mimes!

I couldn’t race to my wallet fast enough for PAIN ($9.99).

The PAIN official website description:

The unique mechanic of the game allows the player to load a character into a human-sized, ultra-powerful slingshot, and fire the character into an active, physics-controlled environment, filled with precarious and humorous situations. Players receive points by stringing together painful collisions and inducing chaos in the environment.

On Thursday afternoon you could buy PAIN from the Playstation Store. By Sunday all I could see was the ability to buy two PAIN characters: one of them in a Santa suit and the other a voluptuous woman for 99 cents each (Update 8:25am PST: A number of players commenting on the official PAIN blog are upset that these holiday characters weren’t included for free and that there is essentially only one level). Although they were still advertising PAIN in the header logo:

This morning I checked and still don’t see the ability to buy PAIN. Was the game pulled or does it no longer show once you’ve purchased it? Assuming you can buy and download PAIN on your PS3, the download clocks in at 201 MB.

Before you can start playing single or multiplayer options you need to go through a short tutorial and learn the controls. I found the R1 button for resetting the slingshot a little too convenient and kept hitting it by accident, but otherwise the controls are nice: X fires the slingshot, add or remove tension with the right thumbstick and adjust angle with the left thumbstick. During flight you can hold L2 and one of the buttons to pull off different air tricks including a helicopter, fart, leg split and cannon ball.

After the tutorial you can enter the single player PAINdemodium mode which is freestyle destruction with your character and two other single player modes. Once you score 1.5 million points in a single slingshot you’ll unlock another area. My best score to date is just over 670,000.

Multiplayer offers a twisted game of bowling (pictured atop). One player bowls with the slingshot character while the other tries to deflect the bowler with things like manholes, grandmas with walkers and more.

This game is twisted and deliciously entertaining; one of my favorite games in the Playstation Store thus far. I only planned to play for a few minutes in between Rock Band sessions (yes, we’re still enjoying that game) and PAIN drew me in for almost two hours of mayhem. There are some hidden areas (hint: don’t forget to look inside objects) in the PAINdemodium where you can score big points. See if you can find all of them.

It’s too bad there isn’t an ability to play online against your friends. For $9.99 if/when you can download in the store it’s still worth adding to your collection, PAIN on! Grade: B

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