Sony's downloadable ragdoll game, Pain, just got a new update. You might have missed this one last November considering all the actual games you could have been playing instead. In Pain, you launch your boneless character from a giant catapult, banging him into various stuff in a small city block consisting of things for the Havoc engine to do: swinging beams, rolling donut signs, light traffic, precarious scaffolding, and so on. Points are scored for various Jackassey like racking your own nuts, hitting old ladies, or getting dragged under a truck.

Unfortunately, this ten dollar download was little more than a physics demo. You could mine the single level of all its juvenile hilarity in one sitting. If you were into tedious mime grabbing and monkey smacking, they were included to pad your playing time. In the latest update, you can further pad your playing time by unlocking modes that let you launch from completely different places. Now when I say "completely different places", I mean places within the small place where Pain entirely takes place. There's no new content to speak of. Instead, the old content gets shifted ever so slightly. There's also a downloadable mode with more explosive crates than usual strewn around.

The developers are planning an amusement park add-on, which will presumably be sold later this year. Next week, we supposedly get a free character. But for such an under-developed game, it's insulting how Sony is milking this thing for micropayments. For a dollar each, you can get new characters like a midget ninja, a naughty nurse, a bad Santa, and so on. But the character I'd most like to catapult into the side of a building is whichever executive at Sony is in charge of trying to nickel-and-dime gamers with this bare minimum of a game.