Contest Stats and Discussion - Part 1383

KamikazePotato posted...

Leonhart4 posted...
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4156-southwest-division-round-2-skies-of-arcadia-vs-mass-effect

Skies of Arcadia fans were just happy that this game made round two of a contest. Please remake (or even remaster) this game, Sega!
I'd settle for a barebones port!

EDIT: Actually, 'Barebones Port' sounds like a cool Skies of Arcadia location.

I do think if they are going to dig Skies of Arcadia up, they need to speed up the battles. Legends port does wonders for the encounter rate, but the game's animations being so slow is the one flaw that keeps it out of my Top 10 of all time.

Well, the animations are skippable, at least!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4157-west-division-round-2-metal-gear-solid-3-vs-marvel-vs-capcom

The Oracle average was around 65% for MGS3 here, so it underperformed a little. However, it got off to a slow start and actually used the ASV to bulk up its percentage.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6156-best-game-ever-day-29-round-3-dk-country-2-vs-castlevania

The Oracle average was 56% for SOTN. We didn't think DKC2 could win, but we were hoping it'd be a little more respectable than this. Regardless, it definitely had one of the more fun runs in this contest.

So DKC2 loses to Banjo-Kazooie?

...damn I would have loved to see B-K beat two anime games

Thankfully we got the better outcome instead

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4158-west-division-round-2-paper-mario-vs-world-of-warcraft

Paper Mario's Oracle average was about 55% here, so it exceeded expectations by a good bit. The board also slaughtered the casuals. Only 13.73% of brackets had Paper Mario winning, and World of Warcraft had 78% of the Battle Challenge picks.

Yeah, that result was pretty funny considering quite a lot of brackets (presumably) had World of Warcraft winning the whole contest.

I remember briefly pushing WoW as a contender to beat Paper Mario. Pretty sure NGamer on the Show made a 'really, dude?' comment that incentivized me to switch off. Thanks NGamer.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6157-best-game-ever-day-30-round-3-zelda-a-link-to-the-past-vs

The Oracle average was 65% for LttP, so it outdid that by a good bit. This result suggests FFIV would've gotten 57-58% on Dark Souls. I wonder how it would go now.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6136-best-game-ever-day-22-round-2-metal-gear-solid-v-vs-dark

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8023-division-7-semifinal-dark-souls-vs-metal-gear-solid-v

Assuming consistent MGSV and LTTP, what does Dark Souls get on LTTP in 2020?

KamikazePotato posted...

Assuming consistent MGSV and LTTP, what does Dark Souls get on LTTP in 2020?

35.74%

Edit: And BotW would get 47.79%.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4159-west-division-round-2-metal-gear-solid-4-vs-diablo-ii

The Oracle average was nearly 58% for MGS4. It was evident that it didn't have the strength it had only a year before.

In its 2008 poll debut, MGS4 was giving Brawl a real fight.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3365-best-of-2008-game-of-the-year-final-final-vote

In 2009, it couldn't compete with Brawl anymore, and needed other Nintendo games in the poll to LFF/SFF in order to win.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3501-division-8-final-ssbb-cod-4-mgs4-fallout-3
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3505-contest-quarterfinal-zelda-tp-re4-ssbb-mgs4
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3507-contest-semifinal-zelda-oot-ffx-mgs4-ssbb

In 2010, it was barely stronger than MGS2, and that's after adjusting for SotC catching a rally.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4178-west-division-round-3-metal-gear-solid-4-vs-shadow-of-the

Om 2015, it got easily beaten by Kingdom Hearts II, only performing marginally better than The Last Of Us.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6057-best-game-ever-day-2-metal-gear-solid-4-vs-kingdom-hearts-ii

MGS4 has been a game in gradual freefall. You can also see this trend in the 'Favorite 4 Game' poll series.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4444-whats-your-all-time-favorite-4-game
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5467-whats-your-all-time-favorite-4-game
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/8782-whats-your-all-time-favorite-4-game-title

If we ever held another Games Contest, it would probably be even weaker.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6158-best-game-ever-day-30-round-3-super-metroid-vs-zelda-majoras

Super Metroid had been impressive so far, but we all expected that to end here. The Oracle average for Majora's Mask was nearly 57% here. It was closer at the start than we thought it'd be, but Majora's lead was gradually increasing over the first 30 minutes.

Then Super Metroid started cutting. The two would go back and forth for a while, but after two and a half hours, Super Metroid took its first lead. Then for the next two and a half hours, the lead never got higher than 20 votes for either game.

Super Metroid used the morning vote to build a 300 vote lead, but Majora's Mask used the ASV to reclaim the lead and gradually pulled away for a 520 vote victory. Even though it had lost, Super Metroid had cemented itself as one of the stars of the contest by pounding Mario Galaxy and nearly defeating the Game of the Decade.

Year of SNES indeed.

KamikazePotato posted...

If we ever held another Games Contest, it would probably be even weaker.

need that MGS Vol 2 Collection and not more editions of MGS3

I agree about MGS4 in principle, but I think it was still pretty strong in the '09 contest. That Round 3 match pic was basically Brawl sticking out like a sore thumb, so it probably overperformed a bit there.

Yesmar_ posted...

I agree about MGS4 in principle, but I think it was still pretty strong in the '09 contest

I think so, too. There's no reason to discount its performance on FFX in the semifinal, and that's a good showing.

Eh I would bet Ocarina has a lot more overlap with FFX than MGS4.

I know it's weird to insinuate something like SFF there, but I think it makes sense

Seeing MGS2 vs. 4 in a modern contest would be fun. How badly does 4 get SFF'd?

I guess you could argue MGS4 had a sore thumb factor there or something, but eh, everything has overlap. It's just a matter of whether there's a disproportionate favoring of one over the other. I don't think FFX would've been affected that much, especially since OoT and Brawl are already there impacting each other.

OrangeCrush980 posted...

Seeing MGS2 vs. 4 in a modern contest would be fun. How badly does 4 get SFF'd?

Hardly at all, I'd think. I don't think any of the MGS games SFF each other, at least not to any significant degree.

OrangeCrush980 posted...

Seeing MGS2 vs. 4 in a modern contest would be fun. How badly does 4 get SFF'd?

I don't think MGS games SFF each other too strongly

LeonhartFour posted...

It's just a matter of whether there's a disproportionate favoring of one over the other.

There's disproportionate favoring of Ocarina over everything. I think when we talk about games of that caliber they have such large gravity wells of voting that any variation of overlap matters a lot.

To me, sore thumb factor just involves an entry standing out and gaining extra votes it wouldn't have. Like Kirby in a match with 3 edgelords.

pjbasis posted...

There's disproportionate favoring of Ocarina over everything.

Eh, I don't think so. It's just that much more popular than everything (or it was back in 2009). It doesn't create any wonky X-Stats results when it's not facing Nintendo. Clinkeroth didn't create anomalies in scenarios where they weren't expected to either, most of the time.

We're coming up to the end of 2025, which means we've got the last set of retrospectives coming up next year.

We've got Series 2006 and Characters 2006, as well as Rivals from 2011.

However, I didn't do CBIX (2013) or CBX (2018) back in 2023. The first was because I honestly didn't want to do it because it was a mess, and the latter was because 5 years didn't feel like enough time (and there was still hope we might eventually get another contest). I also didn't do Years (2017) in 2022 for the same reason, because it'd only been five years and nobody cared about that contest very much.

But I figured I'd cover all of that next year just to fill up the calendar and finish off all the contests. Hard to believe I've been doing this for four years now and we're approaching the last year. I guess we could start over in 2027, but we'll see!

Putting the start dates up now just to give myself a rough calendar to work from:

Years - 5/2
Series - 7/2
Character Battle IX - 7/9
Character Battle V - 9/12
Character Battle X - 10/19
Rivals - 11/3

So we'll have a wait of several months before we begin, but once we do, it should mostly carry us through the year.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4160-west-division-round-2-metal-gear-solid-2-vs-shadow-of-the

This was a shocker for Board 8. The Oracle average was nearly 56% for MGS2 and only 3 people picked Shadow of the Colossus. However, the casuals were much less surprised by this result than we were. 38.86% of total brackets had SotC winning, and it actually had literally two more picks in the Battle Contest Challenge than MGS2.

Shadow of the Colossus had a slight lead at the freeze, which was surprising, but MGS2 took the lead on the next update and doubled that lead on the one after that, so we figured it was just a false alarm. Then Shadow of the Colossus made a big cut and took the lead back two updates later, so it looked like we were in for a slugfest. The largest lead of the entire match was only 188 votes, the smallest max lead for any match ever at the time (not sure if it's been broken by some of our most recent contests with much smaller vote totals. I didn't check).

Shadow of the Colossus took the lead with five hours to go and looked like it was going to hold on, but then MGS2 made one last charge in the final hour. It actually had the lead with two updates to go, but then SotC got a massive spike on the next to last update (n_n) to give it the win.

As fun as this run was, I really dislike the result lol.

ctesjbuvf posted...

As fun as this run was, I really dislike the result lol.

Basically where I'm at. 2010 was a theoretically great contest, but it was tough to enjoy when almost every close/debatable match went the opposite way of what I wanted.

I'm okay with SotC beating MGS2 in a vacuum (even though I like MGS2 more)

But I was also really looking forward to the MGS gauntlet and it ruined that

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6159-best-game-ever-day-31-round-3-super-mario-rpg-vs-chrono

The Oracle average was 56% for Mario RPG and it blew past that. Was it already in bandwagon mode? It's hard to say, but only 14% of brackets had it getting this far overall. Nearly 54% of Guru brackets had Mario RPG winning, with about 22% for GTAV and 18% for Oblivion.

It is wild to think that Super Mario RPG could have already been in bandwagon mode at this point purely by outlasting casual bait.

That's usually how it works though. Once a character or game starts getting into sub-20% prediction percentages, they're looked at as Cinderella upsets, even if we know they aren't. That feels like the magic number, at least to me.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4161-northwest-division-round-2-zelda-majoras-mask-vs-chrono

Oh hey, it's Chrono Cross losing again! Majora's Mask actually had 74% at the freeze, which was eye-opening and made people really believe this game was a threat. Chrono Cross used the overnight vote to bring the percentage down to a more reasonable level, but Majora's Mask had raised the bar and it was G/S/C's turn to respond.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6160-best-game-ever-day-31-round-3-metal-gear-solid-2-vs-resident

The Oracle average was 55.59% for RE4, so this was a small underperformance. There was now some growing concern that it might be in danger against Mario RPG next round.

KamikazePotato posted...

Basically where I'm at. 2010 was a theoretically great contest, but it was tough to enjoy when almost every close/debatable match went the opposite way of what I wanted.

It probably is among the best contests. I feel confident saying it is the best in the Allen era, but yeah. I can still appreciate this run a lot because it ends perfectly.

Leonhart4 posted...

Oh hey, it's Chrono Cross losing again!

No shame in bowing out to heavy hitters.

Let's get Chrono Cross to Round 4 next time

ctesjbuvf posted...

I can still appreciate this run a lot because it ends perfectly.

I hope you're talking about Link vs. Santa because "Stockholm Syndrome: Contest Edition" is not a perfect ending.

Give me the receipts that people actually switched their vote from FFX to Majora because of Brawlfear.

Like even I was probably someone saying things like that, but my voting preference was going to be MM > FFX > Brawl no matter what

People rallied for Majora, so it's not just a matter of people switching their votes

Just cowards begging for Zelda to keep dominating them when FFX would have beaten Brawl

Leonhart4 posted...

I hope you're talking about Link vs. Santa because "Stockholm Syndrome: Contest Edition" is not a perfect ending.

It's about MGS3 beating Shadow Colossus, if you read the post more carefully.

MacArrowny posted...

It's about MGS3 beating Shadow Colossus, if you read the post more carefully.

I didn't know what "this run" referred to

Although I did love the logic of "the internet will laugh at us if Brawl is our Game of the Decade" as if Majora also isn't a silly winner

Yeah, just saying Majora is irrelevant to that post.

Leonhart4 posted...

as if Majora also isn't a silly winner

I think the reason Brawl is silly actually held up though. No one cares about that game anymore because of the nature of fighting game sequels. Having something that is timelessly popular like Majora winning is not silly at all.

It's less silly but we're still the only place that would happen.

Brawl was one of the most impactful games of that decade though, even if it's no longer relevant.

I hated Majora winning due to the circumstances despite loving the game.

It was indeed refering to MGS3 winning. I responded to a post that responded to me talking about the SotC run!

If anything, Majora's Mask holds up much better as a winner now, considering its influence on games like Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, and other time loop games.

I don't mind it winning in iself. Perhaps it's a little weird having what feels like a 90s game winning, but whatever. Should have been Brawl or FFX.

Ori and the Will of the Wisps, a 2020 game, is the game of the decade.