our eardrum feels like it's being pounded with a hammer. When it's not throbbing in pain, your head is filled with a quick scratching noise. You stick a finger in as far as it will fit. Nothing comes out. Not even wax. Moving on to Q-tips doesn't help, in fact it makes things worse. You go to the emergency room. The attending physician looks into your ear with one of those ear lights. He asks your mother to step outside.

A few minutes later a nurse returns with an aerosol can. You lie on one side as she sprays something into the clogged earhole. Out flies a cockroach. It scampers away, fully alive.

This happens all the time. Just ask Drew Huffman, the president and founder of Pulse Entertainment and creator of Bad Mojo.

The Los Angeles office of Pulse is infested with cockroaches. There are Madagascar and German varieties, just a few of the 5,000 species in existence. All roaches are welcome, that is ever since Pulse's roach adventure game Bad Mojo crawled onto the top ten list of CD-ROM popularity charts.

etter known as "The Roach Game," Bad Mojo places you in the skeletal shell of a cockroach trying to find a way back to its human form, Dr. Roger Samms, Professor of Entymology. If triumphant, you'll escape with $1 million to Belize and find your long lost father. There are three other "successful" endings, one of which leaves you in a room with padded walls.

It's impossible not to reference Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis' as a model for this game, the parallels are obvious. It should also be noted that the game is incredibly popular in Germany (although Kafka was born in Prague, he went to school in Germany from the age of 6) and that Roger Samms is a "loose anagram" of Gregor Samsa, the main character in the book. Another, more important, influence on the game was Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero With a Thousand Faces.' That may help explain some of the game's complexity.

Every crevice is a passageway and each stray bit of paper holds a clue. The movie clips which propel the game along appear meaningless until you discover that old Eddie Battito, the landlord, has a special connection to Samms and the Oracle, a woman who helps you along in a matronly sort of way. Your clues are often bad poetry riddles spoken by fellow roaches, the dying catfish or the Oracle to signal the changing of levels. For instance: "In a dozen fancy bottles life's sweet nectars dwell: A recipe is the motto for one man's living hell." Translation: Find The Barman's Companion in the bar and look up the recipe for a mixed drink named Bad Mojo which you will later concoct. The difficulty of playing Bad Mojo without a cheat sheet is its greatest fault. Even if you can find your way around without getting stuck in some kind of goo, you'll still probably be eaten by Fritz the Cat or the Rat King. The Official Player's Guide includes a detailed "crawl-through" with maps and there are a few on the Web to keep you moving along as well.

And you will continue along, grimacing the whole way. Drew Huffman, Pulse Entertainment's founder and president, calls it the "Booger Principle" -- anything really disgusting will garner lots of attention, hold it, and avoid too much negative backlash. The Bad Mojo team spared no expense in creating nausea-inducing graphics. They followed exterminators around for days to find fresh kills and developed a proprietary script to control the twitchily realistic 3-D roach movements. So, don't play this game after lunch. If you do, try some garlic sautéed cockroach, a century-old cure for indigestion.

The veritable infestation of roach mania in the collective consciousness may have started with Bad Mojo, but now there's the Yukiest Site on the Web, the Interactive Cockroach Identification Page and now the movie "Joe's Apartment," which seems heavily influenced by an obscure Japanese flick called "Twighlight of the Roaches." Expect Bad Mojo to outlast the current roach craze.

ulse will continue to wrangle roaches while they work on their next game: Space Bunnies Must Die, a B-movie styled plot in which alien bunny rabbits take over the world and you must fight them off.

Until Space Bunnies arrives, I'll be hanging out under the toilet -- the brown fellow with wings, trying to find my way home.