As I mentioned in Aeropodcast #42, I recently picked up Sony's 2007 Fumble, Lair. I mean, how bad could it be for $15, right?

It is seriously incredibly superbad.

It is nothing less than astonishing that Sony took this game to hype and back when they had to know that Lair was just about complete trash. And Factor 5, they of Rogue Squadron fame - what in fuck happened to them? This should have been right in their wheelhouse, being another damn flying game, but it is boned over from the minute you start playing.

I should shoot some movies of this game in failing action, because it is hilarious. The tutorial level begins with your dragonrider dude, standing on a castle rampart, being told he has to jump on the dragon. Well, the first thing I do whenever I start a game is hit the pause screen to look over the options. So I do that, and it's slow as hell to bring up the options menu, but whatever. The horrible bit is that when I bail out of options, there's a good second where you can see the castle draw in. Like, the little spiky pyramid bricks decorating the castle balustrade actually build themselves out of thin air, like a Sesame Street short where one tiny ball of clay becomes a large ball of clay.

And then, stunned into silence by this beta-level environment rendering, I noticed that the castle wall textures were gradually coming into focus... which is a trick often used to cheaply and quickly render items far away... they will be blurry and low-res until you approach them, and then they fade (or pop) to full detail. Except in this case, I wasn't moving. At all. The rampart textures were almost randomly switching from blurry to sharp all on their own.

Another standout bit o' awfulness relates to the dragon's movement. For whatever reason, Factor 5 opted to have the dragons never collide with thing. You can fly straight towards a mountainside and the game will animate you swooping away rather than tackle the tricky ethical problems associated with letting dragons smack into cliff walls.

Unbelievably, this also applies when your dragon is running on the ground. One of the early levels asks you to land in the middle of a Lord of the Rings style city siege, with hundreds of enemy soldiers storming the castle. You're expected to smash the four trebuchets lobbing junk over the hometown walls. I ran straight for a trebuchet... and as I got close, the game made my dragon zip to one side of the device even as I continue to push the analog stick towards it. Hello? I'm supposed to smash that, for fuck's sake!

I'm only four levels in - with no inclination towards completing it, by the way - and already I think I've got the plot figured out. Tell me if this sounds right: you're Team A, and Team A hates Team B. But many years ago, A and B were the same team... but politics and volcanoes split everybody up. Team A has been, more or less, the prosperous one, but mired in a state-run religion that no one is allowed to question. Team B followed a path of science.

All of sudden, Team B starts attacking A, even though A has the greater military. The dialogue is packed with cringers about how B cannot stand against the might of God, they'll pay for their heresy, A will show them the true meaning of Aness, etc. But turns out Team B is actually trying to steal resources because their cities are in big trouble...

My prediction: Team B is being routed by a Greater Evil, which will eventually tackle Team A, and A and B will be forced to work together to defeat it, reuniting their sundered peoples and realizing that the other guy isn't as bad as the corrupt priests/politicians had them all believing.

I wonder if I'm close.

This is a predictable clichefest along the lines of Beyond Good & Evil, except that BG&E at least had mostly-good gameplay going for it.

Lair is not worth even $15.

Pain, on the other hand...

...is $5 for one more day, thanks to Sony's summer PSN sale, and totally worth $5. I mean, I paid $5 for Balloon Fight.

You launch ragdoll characters into a city street, trying to chain destruction combos. For example, I launched my guy into the top of a hotel, where he skidded into a rooftop beach chair set and knocked a nearby bikini girl backward into the hotel's neon sign which fall apart and bounced down the front of the building, smashing windows and eventually crashing through a glass roof.

It's fun like that.

Pain's big problem is that Sony intends to have this game nickel-and-dime you to death. You start with one level (with multiple modes) and only one character (with I think three unlockable)... if you want additional characters, they're $1 apiece. Not that you need them, but they do provide something else to throw into cars. And the menu screen has plenty of space for new levels and modes, which I'm sure will arrive in the $3 to $5 range.

But again, you don't have to buy anything other than the $10 ($5 on sale) base game and you'll be fine. It's just sort of disheartening to see a game broken up like that with little price tags at every corner.

Getting Pain was a pain, however. Took me half an hour to download and install, plus another free upgrade install, plus an interminable "updating files" bit that offered no hint of when it might finish. All said, it was about 45 minutes before I could actually play Pain, and then I had to suffer through a tutorial that was also far too long.

Pain allows custom soundtracks, but not if your PS3 is set to rip music as AAC files, which mine is. I guess I could change that, but I feel like Pain really ought to be able to read whatever music files the PS3 itself can generate.

A future update promises to add PS3 Trophy support, which will likely make this my first chance at getting Trophies, unless they patch Warhawk first.