Why an Obscure 2010 DSiWare Game Is the Highest User-Rated Nintendo Game on Metacritic

ign.com:

Last week, a Reddit user by the name of u/SayFuzzyPickles42 took to r/Nintendo to ask a rather strange question:

“Weird question - why is the highest user-reviewed Nintendo game of all time an obscure DSiWare game called Metal Torrent?”

According to FuzzyPickles, they were looking at Nintendo’s user reviews to see where Pikmin 4 had landed, and were surprised to see an obscure DSiWare title called Metal Torrent at the top with a sky-high 9.6 rating. It currently sits above classics like Super Metroid (for Wii), Pokemon SoulSilver, the Metroid Prime Trilogy, and Banjo-Kazooie in the user ratings, despite having a much lower critical Metascore of 62.

In the replies, a handful of fellow redditors offered their theories about this mystery. Maybe this was an example of “meme-brigading,” where a group of community members band together to artificially inflate user scores of a lesser-known game by flooding a page with positive reviews. Maybe there’s an underground cult following that’s just very, very into Metal Torrent. Or maybe it’s just rated so highly because it was (for many) a free game, and people like free things.

While the Nintendo subreddit seemed fairly quick to dismiss the question, FuzzyPickles had me intrigued. Why was Metal Torrent at the top of the Nintendo user review scores? The answer, as it turns out, was none of the things the Reddit community suggested. Rather, it appears to be the quiet work of one gamer who, in 2020, was very upset about a completely different video game, and took out their frustration on multiple Metacritic pages. And while their handiwork has largely been erased elsewhere on Metacritic, Metal Torrent’s dubiously earned crown remains as a strange artifact, and a reminder of how easily