For a brief, glorious moment in time I was the art director for the #1 pinball in the land.

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Alas.

(Serious answer, people game the ratings. They shill a game up to the top, people get mad and give it crummy ratings to drive it back down. Or whatever, tbh I don't actually pay enough attention to understand the details. Please don't buy a game because it's X on the rating, it means literally nothing.)

Not gonna speak for the rest of the team, but I'm not losing any sleep over it. The #1 thing was funny, I shared it with some friends who aren't even into pinball, they thought it was neat. That alone made it worth it. Now it can go wherever, it's a silly system that means nothing.

Just play the pins you enjoy when you have the chance to do so, and skip the ones you don't. I'm kinda behind on the last few years of brand new games, I haven't played a new Stern since Jurassic Park I'm afraid. But was a time I'd played just about every game in the top 100. I like most of them, for the most part.

Very few games deserve to be utterly dumped on. I can only think of Thunderbirds off the top of my head. What a piece of shit. Even the flipper buttons are uncomfortable and suck.

We can tell, because you say "table".

Maybe it's not #1 for you, but for someone some game is #1, if they care about such things. I admit, I don't, but others clearly do.

I dunno who you or I or anyone else is to decide for them. Could be Alien. Could be the game their parents owned when they were a kid and they don't care if you don't like Flash.

And if you say "don't rate things a 10!" then ... what? 9 is the new 10? What's the max allowed? If you say no rating should be above 9 then it's just the same as a 10.

I have a friend who refused to rate his Uber or whatever else a 5 star, because he felt nobody was worth 5 stars. I think that's just being an asshole to people who get dinged if they don't get that 5 star rating. I always rate 5 stars, or I don't rate at all if I can't bring myself to do it. I've never felt vindictive enough about an Instacart worker to want their rating to suffer because I wanted 2 onions and they only got 1.