I admit, I love to look at numbers.

GameFAQs and Honestgamers both list review hits, but what GameFAQs has so far failed to do is allow me to do something as simple as sorting the reviews by number of hits (nor can I easily copy the hits table to Excel to do it there). Honestgamers sorts on hits by default, which gets a special and usually pointless gear in my brain spinning and is inexplicably pleasurable to me.

I derive far too much fun from seeing my most recent review for Fatal Frame slowly claw its way past the bottom of my review list, outpacing other recent additions like Impossible Mission and Phoenix Wright, apparently purely on account of being a more prolific game (as the review is not necessarily superior, and besides, a reader would only find that out after having generated the hit).

On the top end of the list something even more interesting is happening. Metroid Fusion has always been comfortably on top, being one of the best known games I've ever reviewed, and one of my earliest submissions to HG. It's near the top of my GameFAQs hits too. Here, however, it is rapidly being overtaken by a Commodore 64 review of all things, and a relatively recent submissions as well, in Neptune's Daughters. I can only assume the name draws attention, in much the same way Zig's Rapelay review does (except of course that it has over 100k hits and for me, "near the top" means just over 300).

Another thing that interests me and that I can't quite put my finger on yet is the difference between what reviews draw the most hits, relatively, on GameFAQs and what reviews do so on Honestgamers. Taking reviews into account for at least somewhat recent games (Commodore does poorly hitwise everywhere, with the notable aforementioned exception of Neptune's Daughters), stuff like the Phoenix Wrights and Impossible Mission do well on GameFAQs, having overtaken half my earlier reviews there in about a year's time. Here, they don't do much of anything. At the same time, Fatal Frame has been edging its way upwards and if it continues at this pace, it'll find the middle of the list within a few months too, whereas on GameFAQs it is being utterly ignored - despite being among the "Detailed Reviews" at the top of the list, so it's not as though it's being drowned out.

I wonder if the cause of this should be found in the two sites having a different kind of audience. Or if I'm just reading far too much in arbitrary low numbers. No matter, this is the kind of stuff I love to think about when I have a spare moment to free my brain from work stress.