TechTV test-drives infamous game console that lets you inflict actual physical pain upon your opponents. See it in action, Monday 4/22 at 8:30 p.m. Eastern on 'Tech Live.'

COLOGNE, Germany -- So you think you're pretty tough? You've racked up five-figure "Doom" body counts. Your Jedi moves are sick. Lara Croft even slipped you her phone number. But can you handle the PainStation? Tonight's "Tech Live" plays along.

"Come on friend, don't be shy," says a deep voice.

The PainStation is mocking you already.

Standing there in the corner of an old pharmacy building on a nondescript side street in Cologne, the gleaming 4-foot-tall console's menacing bass can be clearly heard over the chatter going on across the room, where the PainStation's two inventors and about a half dozen of their friends are drinking Heinekens and warming up with a few turns on the ancient videogame "Pong" (for reasons that will quickly become apparent).

I walk over and look down at the PainStation screen. I see colored rectangular game icons and the explanations for them:

"increase ball speed 3x"
"doubles pain execution time"
"almost unblockable ricochet"
"quadruples pain execution time"

Pain execution time? What kind of pain? What kind of execution?

"It's really about getting the body involved. That's what we are trying to do," Tilman Reiff says with a grin. Reiff is the software guy. His partner Volcker Morawe built the console -- and the pain-infliction devices I'm about to encounter.

"I was always interested to combine computers and the real world," Morawe says softly. Again, we look down at the screen.

"Hall of Pain," it says, next to a list of top-scoring player initials.

I wonder what it takes to get one's name on that list. And I'm about to find out.

"I'll go first," Reiff says. He takes his position on one side of the console, signaling a tall German dude with a metal eyebrow stud to take the other side. Pierced Eyebrow Guy looks uneasy. "What kind of pain makes a guy who's had a metal spike driven through his eyebrow nervous?" I wonder.

Reiff presses the start button on the side of the console. A buzzer sounds, and there's a metallic rasp, like the sound of a bone saw being sharpened.

After all that buildup, the game itself turns out to be nothing more than an updated version of "Pong" -- but viciously updated.

"Pain Pong."

The pain is guaranteed, because both players must keep their left hand on a metal button at all times or they forfeit the match. Underneath that button lie the Pain Execution Units, or PEUs.

"There's a heat lamp, which burns your hand, and an electrical circuit, which shocks the hand, and a whip, which rapidly whips the same part of your hand over and over very fast, with a wire," Morawe says.

No sooner than he has finished telling me that, I get a firsthand look. At the console, Reiff is really putting it to Pierced Guy (which shouldn't surprise anyone, since Reiff wrote the code, after all) and Pierced Guy is getting burned, shocked, and whipped with regularity.

"Ahhhh!" he yelps. And then Pierced Guy says a few more words that, although they are in German, still can't be reprinted here. But I didn't get the sense that Pierced Guy was in unbearable pain, just enough to make him hop and swear a little. OK, I think, the pain's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be.

In PainStation, you determine your own punishment by how poorly you defend your goal. If your opponent knocks the "Pong" ball past your paddle and it hits one of the colored icons, which it almost always does, you start to pile up punishment points. Lose enough icons and you will get one or more of the punishments (sometimes all three in quick succession). It's a very intense experience, the players warn.

"You feel like you are really a part of the game," says Tilman's girlfriend, an articulate young woman with close-cropped brown hair who seems entirely too sensible to be playing such a game.

"Don't you think this is a little silly?" I ask her.

"No, not at all," she says. "I understand what they are trying to do. They are trying to make the experience of playing more personal."

Certainly playing the game tells you whether you've been hiding a sadomasochistic streak. In PainStation, you're either an Inflicter or a Defender.

"This game gives you the opportunity to inflict pain, that's true," Reiff says. "But most of the time, I think, you are more worried about preventing pain from reaching [you] than about giving it to your opponent."

Morawe says the game was intended as an art project.

"We were trying to make a statement about videogames being too safe, too cold," he says. "And we were quite shocked when it became so famous."

He has just finished playing a match against a tall blond guy, and neither combatant seems to have suffered much, leaving me a little disappointed, frankly.

"I guess I thought there would be more pain," I say. "I saw a picture on your website where the back of a guy's hand had been really mauled by the game -- the skin was broken."

"Right," Morawe says. "That's because we turned the intensity down this afternoon. We've been playing the game a lot, you see, and we all couldn't take any more of it, so to get these people to come I had to turn it down a few levels."

Uh-oh. I knew what I had to do.

"Would you mind turning it all the way back up?" I ask. "We have to be journalistically accurate." (I could feel my teeth clenching on the word "accurate.") But I meant it. There was no way I was gonna come all this way and play the game on less than the maximum setting.

Morawe already had his head inside the console and was making adjustments with a little screwdriver. I heard his muffled voice: "I hope you are sure..."

Playing with pain

For my opponent, Morawe and Reiff handpicked one of their friends who, like me, had never played the PainStation before. For the first few moments, neither of us could get the hang of our "paddle knobs." The "Pong" ball was moving so slowly it seemed there was no way I could possibly miss it, but I did. My icons were taking a beating, but so were his. And the PainStation was starting to make some ominous noises.

The game heated up. The ball started moving faster. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few of my blue icons get hit. Then, all of a sudden, a sharp electrical jolt traveled up my hand and into my forearm. I jumped.

"Ho!" I say, surprised by the severity of the shock, barely able to keep my hand on the pad.

A few seconds later, I felt a searing pain on my palm. Then the whipping started on the other side of my hand.

The whipping mechanism on the PainStation is like a tiny weed whacker turned on its side. The "wire" is actually plastic, but when it is scoring the back of your hand a dozen times per second, it quickly becomes excruciating. And remember, they had turned the intensity level all the way up!

"Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, OWWWW," I say, and I know this, because it is on videotape (Morawe was taping the whole episode, and his giggling is on the audio track). Whip, burn, zap, burn, whip, whip. I wanted to take my hand off that pad in the worst way. I also wanted to use my entire vocabulary of English swear words (but I didn't -- not because I was being polite, but because I knew the TechTV camera was rolling).

It seemed like it took forever, but finally the game ended. I'm sure I must have lost, but the score wasn't nearly as important as finishing with my hand still on the table. I felt triumphant. Reiff came over with a Band-Aid. It had "PainStation" imprinted on it.

"I definitely earned that sucker," I say. He nodded. He applied it over the oozing purple welts on my left hand. I had played full-strength PainStation and had the injuries to show for it. I was one proud dude.

I now understood that playing PainStation is not about enjoying pain, or inflicting it, but about being in the middle of the fight in a way that you can't accomplish with a joystick or a gamepad.

"You would think that if you produce a game that causes pain, nobody would like to play it," Reiff says. "But people either love it or they hate it, and a lot of them love it."

But is there a market for more PainStations?

"Well, we have thought about what to do next," Morawe says, "but what if some weak person plays PainStation and becomes unconscious? I mean, somebody could fall or something, and get really hurt."

"And we also hear the people at Sony are not too happy about our use of the PlayStation font in our logo," he says. "And the 'Pong' owners may not be too happy either that their game is being updated like this without their permission."

Reiff adds, "As long as it was an art project, all of that was OK. But if we try to make money with it, we could have troubles."

So now the two inventors are weighing their options, and hoping a bunch of corporate lawyers don't drop by to inflict a little pain of their own.