I can't say I've played a whole lot recently - rather unfortunately the addiction to Quake Live still hasn't let me go, even though I haven't convinced anyone else I know to join it (as the entry difficulty level is quite high - players are sorted into four tiers and absolutely nobody is on the first two). I don't usually play online games against people I don't know for reasons that I've been reminded of rather frequently since starting, but as it is, the game has the completely unintentional therapeutic properties of handing you a roomful of morons and a rocket launcher.

If I were still sane, this would just be a picture of a plump bird. Instead it's a manifestation of pure evil in its natural habitat.

However, kjorteo has recently been getting us together to watch weekend night video streams of Hatoful Boyfriend (with the advance warning that these videos are three hours long and the volume of the second one starts off at an eardrum-busting level). This is a game that's been gaining infamy on the Internet for the last couple of weeks, and it's well deserved, because to call it absolutely flaming mental would be doing the term something of a disservice. For those who aren't aware of it, the game is a sort of pigeon dating simulator, and as difficult to believe as this may be, the premise is not in itself the weird part of the game. In fact, I've never seen anything that looks quite so much like it came directly out of a nightmare, with the way that it presents you with more and more disjointed insanity and just assumes that you're going to accept its mutated sort of dream logic. It's the same thing that scared me when I first played Mortal Kombat - I just have no idea what this game is going to do next.

As a brief introduction to the sort of level we're dealing with, there's a playthrough thread here - try to bear in mind that this a real game and not (as I had assumed for about five pages) someone just making it up in Photoshop as they went along. Though come to think of it, I could believe that that philosophy was the entire development model for the game.

But you can't really call it "playing" even when you're at the controls, because your involvement in the game amounts to jabbing a dialogue box every now and then and picking where you want to go or who you want to speak to - you're not so much playing as just steering a guided missile towards an inevitable explosion of madness. On the first run through it, most of our path involved talking to a racer dove who had an unhealthy obsession with pudding. On the second, we attempted to go down the school doctor's storyline - who in this production is played by the fat bird shown above - but in the middle we accidentally got sidetracked into a new layer of sub-story about two biker birds beneath the madness of the existing one. It's what Inception might have been like if it had been made by birds with an approximate understanding of human speech and behaviour.

No dating game should be afraid to present you with difficult choices.

I must admit that I was expecting the game to make no sense, but not for the sheer extent to which it managed to do so - the morning after I saw the first chapter of this epic adventure, I honestly had to go back to the stream page and look up the recorded video just to make sure I hadn't been part of a mass hallucination. The translation does its best with the available material, but at several points throughout the proceedings when people - I mean... birds - start coming in and exchanging long strings of non-sequiturs about pudding and/or beans, it starts to feel roughly like what happened in Final Fantasy 8 when time was compressed.

I'll say one thing - last night, the certificate/provisioning permissions system for Apple began to make sense. I think this game has just got me used to a whole untapped level of insanity.