"Played any new good games lately?" asks Friend Brian as we're queueing up our 215th hour of Borderlands 3. Sadly, the answer is "no."

I spent most of the spring and summer playing the fantasy-genre tactics game Unicorn Overlord and loving it. (Considering that I spent more than 100 hours 100-percentiing that game, you won't be surprised to hear that I rate it a 10 out of 10!) Finding a worthy follow-up has been a bigger challenge than the game itself.

Part of the problem has been that I've been trying to get by without spending a lot of money. Like everyone else in America, I feel that everything is too expensive, but saying that I'm saving money because of the post-pandemic economy has put a squeeze on my income would be an exaggeration if not an outright lie. I'm really just a cheap bastard. (If I could be sure a game I bought was going to give me a hundred hours of entertainment, sure, I'd pay up. But there are only so many Unicorn Overlords and Borderlands 3s out there.)

Because I pay Xbox (current Gamerscore: 161,005) for the ability to play online with friends (proving that I have more money than brains, as very few of my friends even have an Xbox), Microsoft offers me access to some games for free. Using that program, I tried Snow Runner. It belongs to the genre calling themselves sims: virtual duplicates of real world situations with a minimum of added gamification. Imagine an application in which you manipulate only one digitally rendered straw of hay a time while you look for a single pin and you'll get the idea. Heck, that would probably be more fun than Snow Runner.

Snow Runner is a game in the same sense that pushing a single Tonka truck back and forth through a mud puddle is a game. Like any competent drug dealer, Snow Runner gives you a couple of trucks, but the rest you have to explore to find for yourself (or outright buy to unlock). By "explore," I mean "trudge very slowly into deeper and damper quicksand from which there is no escape." If you google Snow Runner, you will find many comments from players admitting they expect others will find it boring and bemoaning what it might say about them that they find enjoyment in it. All I can say for sure is that apparently there are a lot of masochists in the world.

The fifth time my truck got stuck in a ditch (forcing me to reset to my distant garage) was enough for me. I grew to hate this so much that the main reason I'm posting about video games today is so that I can tell the world how much Snow Runner sucks. I think Xbox gives it out for free to punish people looking for free games. I'm starting to get the message.

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As I type this, I have exactly 100,000 Xbox GamerScore.

You might think that's a pretty big number. It is.

You might ask what that's good for. Not a damn thing.

You might say no sane person would willfully spend so much time accruing meaningless statistics. That's a fair point.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go check Google Maps to see how many more miles I have to drive before I would have reached the moon. (Only 192,000 more to go!)

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I've finally passed 50,000 Gamerscore on the Xbox 360. (I'm at 50,074, to be precise.) It rolled over On Sunday as I was playing Just Cause 2, a game I'm not in love with but seem unable to stop playing. (Ninety hours and counting!)

Having a score of 50k most likely means that I play far too many games. I only started acquiring Gamerscore in 2009, which means I average about 10,000 Gamerscore per year. Is that a lot? Back in 2011, the average gamer had better than 11,000. I can't find a more recent count, but it's probably gone up significantly since then. There is at least one 1,000,000 Gamerscore gamer now, and he alone has to be pulling the average up a bit.

I'm not going to say that I never play games with the intention of increasing my Gamerscore, but knowing that I can score some Gamerpoints has certainly kept me interested in some titles long after the fun had expired. Not Just Cause 2, though. I don't know what's up with that game. Helping the CIA start a civil war in Indonesia never gets old.

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