LogFAQs > #935292406

BEST #2: Sub-Zero beats the Chief

Master Chief 49.05% 62932
Sub-Zero 50.95% 65358
TOTAL VOTES 128290

One of the great anomalies of early contest-ing was Scorpion making the bracket in 2002. Nominations in 2002 were not exactly formal and 2002 Scorpion was especially notable because it walked into what's probably the easiest eightpack ever, at least in the old days before we started doing 128 item contests. (I think I've come to the conclusion that these cheapen the contest experience, and this contest would probably be better if we just cut out all the round 1 matches and started in round 2? your mileage may vary here)

Anyway, Scorpion wasn't bad, but he wasn't really good either, and was well known for his squishy bracket making him seem more legit than he was. There were always these MK polls that showed Sub-Zero as the best character from the game, but Mario polls also showed Yoshi as the strongest character and while Yoshi ain't bad, he ain't Mario either. Sub-Zero might be marginally better than Scorp, but they were clones - he wasn't going to be THAT much better. This isn't Ryu and Ken.

Or is it? That was the debate, but most people didn't want to hear it. Master Chief was a massive favourite in 2006, to the tune of 125-8 in the Guru. That never sat right with me. I was a monster MK player in the arcades and let me tell you, Sub-Zero was the guy in those classic games. Master Chief, meanwhile, was... I guess he was fine?, but he had this tendency to overperform on legit competition and underperform against the rest of the field. Chief put up a decent showing on Crono in 2005, but he also needed the whole day to make a comeback on Donkey Kong a couple weeks prior.

I remember fighting this one to the nth degree, yelling about it to anyone who would listen in those days. A lot of people just glossed over it because "no one cares about MK" which, sure, but no one really cared about Halo either. So I took to the Crew (a guest at that time) and wrote some monster post that was very unlike me saying exactly why Sub would win, using Frog x-stats and all sorts of dumb stuff. Like Aeris/Zelda, there was a new MK game that hit at around the time of this match. That surely didn't matter but it gave more fodder for arguing about it.

And then the match hit. Master Chief won the board vote (brackets???) and then Sub-Zero just slowly put it out of reach. Chief did his big daytime comeback (ah, 3am start times) but it didn't matter. This one was really sweet. Just one point, but it felt way bigger than that. We had uncovered a new strong character which, by 2006, was very few and far between.

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xyzzy