PWB December: I'm dreaming of a white Soc-mas

Starting this because everyone else is too slow. But I'll add my games later…

Play

Gears of War - doing co-op of every game with my brother because we can just play them all on game pass. They're still really fun games and turning someone into a volcanic explosion of meat with the Torque Bow never gets old. The first game doesn't go too crazy either but you can already see with how Gears 2 begins they're upping the ante a little. It's a shame that Cliffy B seems incapable of making a good vehicle section or boss fight though because all of both in the first game are trash, yet we're getting them in every game I fear.

Halo Infinite - Multiplayer is pretty much all I need gaming wise right now.

Final Fantasy XIV - Made my last minute dash to get Paladin to Level 80 last night as my last act before Endwalker drops in a few days. The Tank role quest was absolutely depressing, but in a good way, as well written as the rest of the expansion was. Endwalker has a LOT to live up to, but at thev ery least…we'll be going to the fucking MOON, so there's that.

Want
Yo, for some reason I feel like if I don't beat Lunar 2 this year I will be a failure as a human being

Bin

you can already see with how Gears 2 begins they're upping the ante a little

A little? A little. Gears 2 ups the ante a little. Isn't that the one where they're sinking cities with a giant worm? And that's only upping the ante "a little"?

Starting this because everyone else is too slow. But I'll add my games later…

It's a good thing you did, I was going to put Wham in the title.

Play
I seem to have completely stopped playing videogames. Again.

2000AD! I've been catching up with this year's subscription, which I have been enjoying a lot more than reading them weekly and trying to follow the stories.

RPGs! Traveller is going well. Still struggling with 13th Age, I'm not giving up yet though. I might run a Mushroom Kingdom special for Christmas.

Want
To close the curtains, sit on the couch and watch Taskmaster till it gets warm again.

Bin
Star Wars: Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight Still very Star Wars, not very good.

you can already see with how Gears 2 begins they're upping the ante a little

A little? A little. Gears 2 ups the ante a little. Isn't that the one where they're sinking cities with a giant worm? And that's only upping the ante "a little"?

Okay yeah, that's fair. I hope this doesn't mean the entire game is set underground though because I liked fighting through the streets in the first game.

Play

Mostly just hopping into Animal Crossing again. Started to redesign the area around my airport but I've not really decided what I want to do so it's stalled a little. Still keeping up with the daily tasks, though.

TTRPG-wise, I finished up the Avatar Legends mini-arc I was running but the players have decided to keep going with that rather than switching to another "one"shot. I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with a compelling arc, but I have a bunch of hooks so I might just see what falls out.

Most of my "me" time at the moment, though, is spent reading - I tried to blitz through The Expanse novels in the eleven days before the new one came out, which turned out to be overly optimistic. I'm on book six now, so I'm gonna keep going and hope I avoid spoilers before I get to #9.

Want

Not to feel sick anymore. I've had a cold (just a cold) for what feels like a month, and its making me tired and grumpy. Well, grumpier.

Bin

I think I messed up something with the main quest line in Fallout New Vegas and ended up with no mission to do and no actual ending. I've got an earlier save, but the wind is out of my sails somewhat.

Play

I'm still plodding through Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. 85 hours in and no end in sight. I had a brief flurry of actual plot last night but now I'm back to ticking off the endless regions of England for reasons that remain unclear. Having picked it up and put it down a few times, I'm determined to see this through to the end now though, I have a couple of other big story games I want to start but I have to clear this behemoth off the backlog at some point. Apparently there are at least four endings (the main plot, killing all the Order members, completing all the animus anomalies and whatever bullshit is going on in Jotenheim) plus of course the DLC, so I'm just aiming to see the end of the story for now and I can come back for the other stuff at my leisure.

Halo Infinite continues to be a great multiplayer game marred by a terrible progression system. It actively rewards people for showing up and doing nothing, or ignoring the actual objective and instead trying to complete their shopping list of "challenges". It needs fixing fairly urgently and I hope that happens because the actual core of the game is great.

Want

I think I'm going to have to play Halo 4 and 5 in order to understand what the hell is going on in Infinite's campaign, so they're next on my list to play after I get Valhalla done. Suspect they'll take me a bit longer than it took Alastor though.

Still fancy the idea of a Final Fantasy XIII replay too. Shame it didn't get the 60fps treatment like the two other games in the series.

Bin

I'm surprised how quickly I've grown bored of Forza Horizon 5. It's a good game for sure and it's not like I have any actual issue with it but I rarely feel inclined to play it, or even remember it exists. I can't work out if that's because it's virtually identical to the last instalment, or because the "go anywhere, do anything" approach removes most of the challenge from the game.

The slow-motion car crash of Boris failing to "save Christmas" is exactly the same as what happened last year, and I am very tired of it.

Most of my "me" time at the moment, though, is spent reading - I tried to blitz through The Expanse novels in the eleven days before the new one came out, which turned out to be overly optimistic. I'm on book six now, so I'm gonna keep going and hope I avoid spoilers before I get to #9.

Have you read them before? How are you finding them? I've bounced off the tv show a couple of times, never got further than the first couple of episodes, but everything I hear about it makes me think I should persevere with either tv or books…

Have you read [The Expanse] before?

Yeah, I've read them all before – this was my third time through the first couple, but I've only read these later books once. There's stuff I'm noticing more this time around that I find a little tiresome (for instance, there are no sex scenes but there's a lot of talking about sex in a way that makes me think of teenagers boasting), but also I'm absolutely into the story and the characters. Even knowing what happens, my heart's been pounding reading some of the stuff in book 5. They're not challenging books, though – the writing's very straightforward. I wouldn't have been able to sit through five William Gibson novels back-to-back, but these are extremely easy to read.

The TV show does a lot of things differently – combining characters, introducing others earlier, shuffling events around, and I very don't like how Avasarala is introduced committing war crimes – but it's very good once you get past the admittedly rough opening couple of episodes. It dumps a lot of stuff on you at once without the benefit of a novel character's inner monologues, but the production design and casting have influenced how I picture everything that happens.

If you were only going to pick up one of them, I'd probably go with the books though, on balance. Mostly because they'll actually finish the story (and there are a bunch of novellas that fill in backstories and worldbuilding even more).

The show is finishing up before it covers the entire story, isn't it - does that affect your recommendation?

I've been meaning to start it for ages but if it's basically going to end up incomplete then I'm wondering if it's still worth my time.

It's hard to know how "incomplete" the TV series is going to end up – there's a big timeskip between books 6 and 7, but that is a reasonably good place to leave it for most of the characters.

However: the trailer makes me think there's going to be a not-insignificant amount of stuff laying the groundwork for post-timeskip TV (or movies) – one scene in particular from the latest trailer (which is taken from one of the novellas, Strange Dogs) is a big piece of foundation for stuff that happens in book 8 (and, presumably, book 9).

So… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At last, someone else who has bounced off the Expanse TV show a couple of times. I just don't like it. I find it hard to put my finger on quite why, but I think the script and acting is sub par (not all the actors, just quite a lot of them) and I just…. I don't know. I should like it, but I've tried 2 or 3 times and just couldn't get into it. I am tempted to try the books though.

My Play so far is Last of Us 2. And, yeah. Well. It certainly looks nicer, but I don't know. Maybe I'm turning into a Gamergater or something, but the first hour felt a little forced as to how hard it was trying to be as progressive as possible. And yeah, yeah, I know lesbian kisses/sex, polyamory, ethnic minority friends, body types not forced on us from the patriarchy and an almost entirely female led cast shouldn't be notable in the slightest (as it's just the opposite of all that is the videogame norm and just as valid), but I don't know. Perhaps I'm just alt right now. Some of the opening bits are incredibly cringy as well, possibly deliberately, but quite uncomfortable to be part of in any event.

Also, the thousands of new movement options and busywork introduced into the game doesn't really help it. I found myself in many of the environments wondering where the game wanted me to go. And then wandering. And then realising I needed to use one of the new abilities (crawling, jumping etc). The original was occasionally ridiculous in how it used the same drag box/swim with pallet puzzle over and over again, but it felt a bit cleaner than this. LoU2 also introduces annoying locked rooms/boxes puzzles where a combination is almost always nearby, scrawled on a wall or something like it's 1998. It's like the more they've tried to hide it's a videogame, the more like a videogame it feels. I'm struggling enough with the fact I'm playing a 19 year old homicidal maniac who stabs dogs, I'm not sure I needed about a hundred systems layered on top to keep me "entertained".

LoU 1 felt a bit like a peanut butter sandwich. Good. Simple. This is like an artisan burger covered in 14 toppings and sauces which falls apart when you pick it up, depositing ketchup into your lap. It's not bad, but so far it feels a bit…. much?

Thanks aniki (and totally agree with cav about script/acting too). I think I'll give the audio books a go based on the above. I like to have a fairly straightforward series on the go to get me through late night child-settling sessions. Currently halfway through The Dark Tower for that purpose and I think these might follow that quite nicely.

Most of my "me" time at the moment, though, is spent reading - I tried to blitz through The Expanse novels in the eleven days before the new one came out, which turned out to be overly optimistic. I'm on book six now, so I'm gonna keep going and hope I avoid spoilers before I get to #9.

Have you read them before? How are you finding them? I've bounced off the tv show a couple of times, never got further than the first couple of episodes, but everything I hear about it makes me think I should persevere with either tv or books…

Someone I worked with was constantly trying to get me into the expanse, we somehow messed up when trying to start though and started with Episode 1 of Season 2, obviously it made no sense but it just didn't seem very good, the acting seemed appalling from large numbers of the cast.

I really can't get enough of people saying the acting in the Expanse is shite. Every time I've mentioned this in the past to fans of the show they've not taken it well.

It's not universal, but it gives it a weirdly lumpy tone where in one scene you can have someone acting properly and another with a blank face sounding like they're reading out a hostage statement.

A couple of additional Plays, both on Game Pass if you're interested:

Townscaper is a silly little toy where you click around and it builds a town for you. The algorithm is quite nice in the way it generates little houses, streets and towers based on where you click but really there's nothing much to it at all. It did give me 1000 gamerpoints in about 20 minutes though so there is that.

The Forgotten City might be a low-key masterpiece, a timeloop mystery game developed by three people that started as a Skyrim mod. It's excellent from what I've seen so far, a first-person version of a point-and-click game where you interrogate people and pick at the seams of a Roman town trying to solve the mystery of what's going on. It's really well-written, satisfyingly intricate and completely absorbing.

Best do this now, since I have my personal laptop open and it's easier than doing it on my phone…

PLAY
Sea of Thieves - Season 5 is underway and I'm still playing, still got loads to do in terms of commendations but thankfully, only Reapers to max out for reputation (and Sea Dogs but, really, Arena can do one). Looking forward to Season 6 already…
Binding of Isaac: Repentance - Haven't hit this one as hard as I thought I would have, but I'm slowly getting into the groove now that I can reliably reach Dogma/Beast nearly every time. Being able to force open the extra 'tainted' characters is good too, I'm glad I know how to get those available so I have more to mess with.
Hitman 3 - The final Patient Zero mission is a bastard, so I've hit a bit of a roadblock here… but I don't want to move on to the Hitman 2 levels until I've done it. Hmm.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Got back on the bandwagon for this, but I've not even touched the Happy Home Paradise stuff because there isn't enough time in the day. I'll get there eventually.

WANT
Tails of Iron - I've been watching this for ages, but it's outside my instabuy price range. When it inevitably goes sub £15 in a sale, I'll grab it.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land - My next project at work, and I'm super excited for it. It looks absolutely goddamn brilliant.
Better Xmas ideas - I thought I was being clever by getting all of my partner's presents out of the way by August, but now I've wrapped them and I think they're all crap. Best get something else to bulk out that space under the tree.

BIN
Evil Genius 2 - I really liked the original game, but that was way back when I played PC games and used a mouse; ten minutes of trying to get to grips with a builder game with a controller on Xbox and I'm out. Even the 'Set up your preferences' screen you get before you even get past the title screen confused me with so many options. Good thing it was free on Game Pass.
Home office - We went back into the office for work a while back and I loved it; it was only one day a week as mandatory, but I took the opportunity to do all the days I could and enjoyed the space, the fresh air, getting out. Now we've back to home working unless there's a reason to go in and it's hit me really hard… I'm not enjoying this at all and I feel really demotivated. Bah.

Oh god, an additional BIN:

Serious Sam 4 - Halfway through the first level and it's deleted. Ugh. Dunno if I'm spoilt now we're on the current gen, but this is ugly as hell and no fun to play. Duke Nukem called, he wants his schtick back.

And another BIN:

Sable - Yawn. BORING. And what's up with the animation style, half smooth movement and half staccato jerkiness? No thanks, deleted.

Can you tell I have the day off and I'm rattling through stuff randomly?

Evil Genius 2 - I really liked the original game, but that was way back when I played PC games and used a mouse; ten minutes of trying to get to grips with a builder game with a controller on Xbox and I'm out.

Thanks for the reminder, I must check this out. I've become quite used to playing builder-type games on a controller thanks to stuff like Two Point Hospital and Planet Coaster - the boy is currently building something epic in Cities Skylines too. I think we'll enjoy this one.

Speaking of which - Ubisoft are currently giving away Anno 1404 History Edition, that's an old favourite of mine. I thought I'd install it on my (resolutely non-gaming) laptop to see if I could get it to work and it runs an absolute treat, far better than I thought it would. So I thought I'd try Anno 1800, surely I can get that running too as it's not that different? 2 fps. Bloody PCs.

Another PLAY:

The Wild At Heart - Started this a while back and lost track, but have fallen back into it today while I've been off. It's lovely! Very Pikmin, but it feels like there's more of a purpose and the story is nice. There's lots to do, plenty of puzzles to solve and the combat is nice. The lack of a time limit in terms of story length does make it slightly more relaxed; when night approaches, you just sleep to the next morning and everything's fine, though there are a few things you need to do during the night that are quite tense. Looks lovely too. Free on Game Pass, if anyone cares. Gonna finish it, which will be nice, though I dunno if I'll get 1000pts.

Play: We've moved and I've not really had the time or opportunity to play anything since October. But then I got a monitor for work and then my girlfriend was back in Glasgow for a weekend and I hooked up the PS4 and had a classic Saturday night of looking through my games library, updating Dead Cells, then downloading something new from the store and getting through the first couple of hours before it was time for bed.
The game I went for was Unsighted. Had a great time with it for an hour and a bit, it seems really interesting but now, whenever I hook up the Playstation, I've been going back into Dead Cells. It's pretty incredible how far that game has come and stayed the same.

Want: I bought an Anbernic RG280V about a month ago but the company couldn't deliver to the new address because it's over the Cairngorms. Ironically living here was the motivating factor in finally buying one of these.
Sent it to a pal in Glasgow but have a couple of weeks to wait to collect. It's a bit like the dabbling in the Raspberry Pi & Retro Arch; I'm not sure what I really want to play but pretty excited about the set up. I've a vague hope that it will capture the eldest's interest and we can play some Mario and Sonic together on it.

Bin: I don't know… we moved to what seems to be the Covid capital of the Highlands, my mum had a stroke (she's, without exaggeration, TOTALLY FINE but it was a shock when it happened), I'm done in and could do with a real break. The fortnight I was up north would have been, in theory, a bit of a skive from family life – I'm really not exaggerating when I say my mum bounced back really quickly: by day 4 she was telling me to come in and sit down so she could watch the last ten minutes of the Third Man on telly – but my mother is an awful hoarder so I took the opportunity to throw out a lot of stuff from her house. I've been saying for years that I'll have to do it when she dies & would obviously prefer she took care of it so it seemed like an opportune moment while she was confined to the hospital (despite being totally fine). Days of trips to the dump to recycle minutes for meetings for committees she was on in the 90's/00's/10's and appliances that just hung about the house. Confirmation of my suspicion that she was keeping the local home appliance shop in business when I found all manner of portable radios, Wifi dongles and other misc kit that there was no reason for her to have based on any other tech in the house.
She also had this mad lodger in her rental property who made life challenging. Someone who, no joke, screamed at me in the street 'I AM A LADY AND MY WORD IS MY BOND!' and who is named in this Sheriff Court report: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12108717.drunken-sailors-rescue-bill-vow-finds-favour-with-the-sheriff/
Anyway, I could do with a long sleep and a few days alone but that's never going to bloody happen now that Christmas is nearly upon us.

The Expanse: Tried it twice. Didn't get on with it. Should be into that brand of Space Pish but for many reasons outlined above did not. Thought maybe the first bounce was a baby related tiredness or similar. Nah.

So, there's an Expanse game coming now.

Look what you all did. FFS.

Space Pish is probably the best summary of The Expanse I've ever seen.

Where have you moved in in the Highlands? Soc Inverness meet?

Additional WANT:

Tunic - Bit gutted that the demo released for winter is the same one they did in the summer. But it's confirmed for March now, so sign me up for some foxy adventure goodness.

Space Pish is probably the best summary of The Expanse I've ever seen.

Where have you moved in in the Highlands? Soc Inverness meet?

Yeah, we're on The Black Isle. Can't tell you how much I'd enjoy a meet up with anyone outside of this house!

The Forgotten City might be a low-key masterpiece, a timeloop mystery game developed by three people that started as a Skyrim mod. It's excellent from what I've seen so far, a first-person version of a point-and-click game where you interrogate people and pick at the seams of a Roman town trying to solve the mystery of what's going on. It's really well-written, satisfyingly intricate and completely absorbing.

PLAY - The Forgotten City is really great! Avoiding spoilers here, as it's definitely more fun if you go in without knowing much. We played it over a few evenings together and finished it last night. Very satisfying. The rules of the game work well and consistently, the puzzles are all logical, and you can talk your way through most things with sensible choices based on the characters of the people you meet (but there are some nice surprises in there too). The acting is surprisingly good for a low budget job too. There's a bit of jank in there, as would be expected from such a small team working with a famously buggy engine, but if you want five or so hours of good solid, well-thought-out gaming, you could do a lot worse than give this a bash. Very interested to see what they do next.

Holy shit they have just announced a ton more content for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. They are literally releasing this stuff faster than I can play it. Tomorrow there's going to be some Odyssey crossover DLC and then in March there is a 40-hour expansion that's apparently a third of the size of the original game. Plus more to come later in the year. I haven't even finished the main game or played the Francia DLC yet, and I spent most of the last two days playing the challenge tombs they just added in the last update (which are great, by the way). Madness.

The one thing we don't need related to Assassin's Creed is more of it then we're already getting.

Actually it's a little more interesting than I'd thought - the crossover event is taking place in both games - the story starts in Odyssey and continues in Valhalla. So they are actually adding new quests to Odyssey, years after that game was finished.

I wonder if this is a bit of a dry run for Assassin's Creed Infinity, the live service game they are apparently doing next. They've got enough characters in enough time periods in this franchise now to do some very interesting crossovers. I know "live service game" sounds cursed but you could use that term to describe both Valhalla and Hitman 3 - which are effectively just single-player games with extensive post-launch support - so I'm keeping an open mind for now.

They need to do Assassin’s Creed: Middle-Ages.

Not set in the Middle Ages; for middle-aged people with jobs and kids. It could be six hours long from start to finish, with a complete story and no expansions.

I'd be interested in an AC set in the future. Cyberpunky. I assume they've not done this. I know the animoomus works a particular way or some shit, but by now surely any pretence this is based on DNA or something has long gone and they can go hog wild in space without anyone giving a shit.

Late Play
Days Gone. Two dudebros fuck up zombies (sorry, "freaks"). It's sort of terrible. Like Army of Two with the personality TAKEN OUT. The story is bad. I'm not sure it's graphically that good either - maybe at times? And the dudebros. One is bald dudebro. The other is hair dudebro. Their character traits are one is sad because his wife might be dead. The others' character trait is…. I dunno, tattoos? They both like bikes. And knives. THE DAMN APOCALYPSE HAS MADE THEM BOTH DO THINGS THEY REGRET. There are zombies. You shoot them in third person with guns. There's the same crafting as in other games like this. I don't even know. It's a game. Things happen. Maybe it has a surprise twist. I imagine his wife is actually alive? Dudebros.

Evil Genius 2 - I really liked the original game, but that was way back when I played PC games and used a mouse; ten minutes of trying to get to grips with a builder game with a controller on Xbox and I'm out. Even the 'Set up your preferences' screen you get before you even get past the title screen confused me with so many options. Good thing it was free on Game Pass.

I've played this for an hour or so and I like it enough to carry on with it, though I agree it's obviously designed with a mouse pointer in mind and they probably haven't done quite enough to make it feel natural on a controller. Everything seems to involve loads and loads of clicks up and down menus, obviously with a mouse that would just be a single click but here it's all quite laborious. All the text is also quite small (clearly designed for a monitor rather than a TV).

Still, it's nice to get games like this on console at all and it's far from the only game with these issues (Two Point Hospital had similar problems). Only XCOM and Cities Skylines have really thought about how a PC strategy game should transition to console, with straightforward controls and big chunky fonts.

Evil Genius 2

I've gotten a reasonable distance into the tutorial/campaign, but it's hit a point where the FOJ incursions into my base are non-stop, and I feel like I spend more time handling those than doing any world domination.

Also, if you find a way to view/clear the little notification icons in the bottom-right, let me know - I've pressed every button on the pad, but haven't managed it yet.

BIN

Echo Generation - I started this a while ago, but fell off it pretty early. Put a whole evening of time into it last Friday, got two thirds of the way through… and then realised I wasn't having any fun. The gameplay is incredibly basic, consisting of a) point and click style fetch quests where person A wants X before they'll do Y, but getting X requires you to find something for person B, etc, and b) increasingly difficult turn-based battles where the enemies scale up in HP much faster than you can level up to enhance your power/health (you have to pick through, no all stats up) and one error can fuck you up totally. The scarcity of recovery items and money to buy more recovery items doesn't help, and there are only three places in the whole game where you can rest to recover (two of them don't unlock until late on too!), so you're constantly traversing the map to recover since losing in combat leaves your party with half health. It's just… ugh. A chore would be kind. So fuck it, deleted, I don't care about completing things that badly these days.

Play
Babble Royale is a Battle Royale version of Scrabble, and extremely My Shit.

I heard the pitch and literally gasped in delight.

It plays as well as it sounds.

I hate Scrabble.

Me too.

Play addendum

Crackdown 3 - lots of fun. Loads of carnage, a great set of weapons and gathering Agility orbs is the best evolution of the "a million pieces of shit scattered across the map" side mission.

Star Wars Jedi - Also enjoying this. I'm finding it quite hard, but then I always was shit at any game which requires dodging or blocking, and this needs both. Anyway I thought the 3d maze of the first proper level was nicely confusing and they game really gets what Star Wars should feel like. I should probably focus on this so that I don't forget how it works.

Firewatch - I want to like this but the protagonist is an arsehole and an idiot. Also the game didn't save half my progress.

Hollow Knight - Lovely atmosphere to this. Barely scratched the surface.

Mirror's Edge - Still looks fantastic and still exhilarating when you get a good run. I am so bad at it now though.

gathering Agility orbs is the best evolution of the "a million pieces of shit scattered across the map" side mission

I'm pretty sure this is because they're not marked on your map, so there's less of a sense of obligation to find them all. And you don't have to get them all to reach your maximum level, so finding one – and being able to reach it – is a reward, not a reminder of a neglected checklist.

That makes sense, helped along by the fact that you can see and hear them and the glorious victory chime when you reach it.

On Firewatch… without giving the plot away too much, the way the protagonist is, is kind of the point. I thought it was rewarding enough by the end.

I didn't enjoy Crackdown 3. It doesn't quite nail what made the first one good. And time has moved on enough that it now has a hundred, better, open world competitors.

ME is still great, and still looks good. Astonishing for a game made almost 15 years ago.

I didn't enjoy Crackdown 3. It doesn't quite nail what made the first one good. And time has moved on enough that it now has a hundred, better, open world competitors.

Well then I'm glad I'm playing this first.

I mean, at least you're not playing the second one.

Is Sunset Overdrive on Gamepass?

I liked Crackdown 3 simply because it wasn't trying to be a modern open-world game. It's basically just Crackdown. I played it for a few days, had a load of fun then never touched it again.

Sunset Overdrive is and it's in the list to download at some point

I do question your "hundreds" of better open world games though. A quick Google brings up lots of Ubisoft games, GTA, Skyrim, Fallout, Horizon, Zelda and the Witcher. There are a few there that are inarguably better than Crackdown, but not many.

Every game is open world. Except the ones where you're trapped in a box.

OK, I'll take the 4.2 user review average on Metacritic, though also happy to recalculate at the 60% critical review aggregate.

Steam lists around 2800 games in the open world category.

Sorting by user review and applying a cut off, there looks to be around 2300 games listed with user reviews either similar or better.

So you're right to question "hundreds". The answer is in fact "thousands".