Pain: Amusement Park highlighted two issues that I hope the free market wraps in a burlap sack and dropkicks into an oncoming roller coaster. Pain is a game that combines the futility of fake achievements, "yay, you found the x button," and obnoxious micro transactions, "please insert six dollars to advance to the next level." For six dollars the latest installment of Pain gives you access to one gen x ragdoll character and one level, of which you can unlock only one other launch pad located ten feet from the first. Pain claims you can unlock two additional costumes but you have to be a cryptologist or have psychic powers to figure out how. Pain then awards you with copious amounts of pats on the back and then regrets to inform you that all additional content, in the form of new characters, is ninety nine cents and additional time in the game is therefore pointless. How unsatisfying, however cheap, to buy game progress, it defeats the purpose of, well, doing anything. This is a game that should have been sold for ten or fifteen dollars, with more than one level, and a large variety of forward moving progress.

Part of the reason I'm so frustrated is that a game like Pain: Amusement Park could have been so much more. If you pick it up on PSN you'll see the genius in the first half hour before you realize you bought the equivalent of a looping animation. This game should have been designed to reward players for playing and I can think of a million ways this could have been done. They could have given you more ooch, a jetpack to control yourself in flight, new areas that unlock, or secret rooms you can only reach in special ways. Pain could have given you awesome weapons to use, or special in flight poses with special powers, or pogo sticks, or let you drive vehicles you land on, or anything to reward you for throwing your gen x character through his paces. Instead you blow up a few barrels, smack a few monkeys, yawn, and then go back to playing something else. In my humble opinion, micro transactions and meaningless achievements have revealed their true value to players.