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Same thing here with my "Shinobi Legions." I never imagined it would be one of my most popular reviews, but right now it's in second place behind my oldest review (PS2 Shinobi). My recent "Torneko" is experiencing a similar surge in hits. This web site must have some strange unfulfilled niches.

I think various factors go into determining whether a review gets a lot of hits or not. An obvious one is whether it's staff or not. But since that doesn't apply in your case, there are a few others as well:

Popularity: if a game is particularly mainstream or popular, I would expect that to generate a lot of hits. I imagine this partially contributes to your MW2 review, and I'm sure it applies to my Age of Empires review, too, which is my most popular review despite being one of my more poorly written ones.

Uniqueness: That is, whether your review is the only review on the site or for a particular console. I suspect your theory about your MW2 review being the only PS3 review of the game to be at least partially correct. Though I will say that I've seen unique reviews for games, including my own, that don't generate very many hits, but I attribute this to obscurity, which brings us to the next potential factor.

Obscurity: If the game is virtually unknown or only popular among certain circles, then it likely won't generate a lot of hits. I imagine this is the case with some of my reviews such as Musashi. I think this phenomenon is espeially true among Japanese-only titles, especially those who never received an import of some sort of sequel (i.e. Earthbound, which would generate a lot of attention regardless of the installment).

Referrals: Sometimes your reviews will be linked to other sites outside of HG. Of course, this is more common with staff reviews, but it has happened with user ones as well, particularly when a fansite gets involved. I remember being astounded sometime towards the end of '08 when I noticed my Digimon review had skyrocketed in hits. When I googled it to see if it'd turn me up anywhere, I found it had been linked to some sort of fansite, probably because it was the only positive review of the game on HG.

There are probably other factors as well, but these are just a few I thought of at the top of my head. Of course, if some of these factors mix together,they may produce entirely different results altogether. For example, if you produce a mainstream game review but it's already received a lot of coverage, it's unlikely to draw a lot of attention, especially if there's a staff review for it.

Anyway, I find a lot of this stuff interesting. It's really neat to see where your review hits lie after a month or year or so. And it generally feels good when you see a review you never expected to be read a whole lot shoot up all of a sudden, even if the one receiving all the attention isn't the best thing you've ever written.

WQ nailed almost all of the reasons I can think of that a review would prove especially popular. One that she left out that doesn't apply to the Modern Warfare 2 review--but that explains the surge in hits for the Torneko review from Spaceworlder--is that sometimes a review will receive more hits if it's a review of a game in a series that will be seeing a new installment released soon. I would expect traffic to be up for Torneko because another game from the Shiren series that he's been reviewing is about to arrive on Wii. Some people research old entries in a series before buying a newer one.

My most popular review is for a hentai game. Perverts!

2 ways to get hits on this site: review a current popular game (such as MW2) or Hentai. Being staff helps as well.