LogFAQs > #936970832

Match 37: Fallout: New Vegas vs. The Stanley Parable

Fallout: NV 18217
Stanley 4726

Having 4 matches per day is great, because it allows the boring Round 1 matches to be cleared out of the way quickly. And this contest had no shortage of those. Through ten days of the contest, there had been a grand total of two lead changes after the freeze. Undertale managed to make it to the freeze with a 5 vote lead and increased it to 7 at the next update before falling behind for good, and Walking Dead came out so on fire that its max recorded lead was before the freeze (64, compared to the 55 it had at the freeze) and managed slight gains over the next two updates before Bastion took the lead for good at the 40-minute mark. That's it. Even Ori and the Blind Forest, which had a smaller maximum lead than Bastion, never trailed. Honestly, in the absence of rallies, we're probably going to see this in every match.

Fallout: New Vegas was considered by many to be a disappointment, yet it was still better than a 3 to 1 favorite among Gurus for Round 2. Given what we'd seen all contest, this was probably cause for concern.

Match 38: Dark Souls III vs. Dishonored

Dark Souls III 16041
Dishonored 6897

We'd seen Sekiro do well, and Bayonetta overperform on ALBW, and DMC5 "upset" DKC:TF. And now, we had an actual Dark Souls game. And it did...quite well! It doesn't look that way based on percentages, but with votals so low, the difference between winning with 69.93% and 79.40% is only a little more than 2000 votes. And to me, almost 70% on Dishonored does in fact feel more impressive than 79.4% on The Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable is described as an nteractive drama and walking simulator". In other words, it should be utter fodder. Failing to break 80% on it is not great, though coming that close isn't bad, either. FO:NV is a game that was in 2015, where it got almost 56% on BioShock Infinite in R1 and almost 42% on RE4 in R2. So, not bad.

But let's look at Dishonored. We don't have any Games Contest results to work from, but in GotY for 2012, when Allen decided to switch from polling by system to polling by genre, it came in second place in "Action/Adventure Game", still well behind poll winner Assassin's Creed III, but well ahead of third place and in fact exactly doubling up 4th place (in a 10-option poll). We also do have a Character Battle result to look at! Corvo Attano, the main character of Dishonored, made CBIX as a 15-seed. He was blown out by 4-seed Pokmon Trainer Red, but nevertheless managed to just barely double 24-seed Sissel, the protagonist of another game in this bracket, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. Now, there's no good way to figure out the relationship between character battle strength and game strength, but a doubling is a doubling even if it's, to round off, about a 70-20-10 threeway. This is a good performance by Dark Souls III, and it wouldn't surprise me at all to see it pull the upset next round.

Match 39: Binding of Isaac: Rebirth vs. Nioh

BoI:R 9972
Nioh 12968

Nioh was a contest newcomer, an action RPG (good thing for this contest) made by Team Ninja (maybe not so good? This is a very Nintendo-centric board and a lot of Nintendo fans are probably still mad about Metroid: Other M) with a sequel (actually prequel, but its name is "Nioh 2") that was released not even two weeks before this match (always a good thing, but imagine how high it could've gone if the start of the contest hadn't been delayed!). Binding of Isaac: Rebirth had made the 2015 Contest as a 14-seed and proceeded to come up against one of the few things against which the "older = better" would've actually worked in its favor, which along with the fact that it was from a series I'd actually heard of, I initially entertained it as a possibility for our requisite 14-3 upset (3-seeds always tend to be hyped newcomers that inevitably flop; Allen even made a joke out of it in CBIX and of course a 3-seed won it all). Mercifully I was successfully talked out of that; The Witcher 3 nearly tripled it. But "familiar" usually trumps "unfamiliar", so even though the only contest experience BoI had was being weak (the protagonist also made CBIX as an 18-seed, but that meant an immediate date with a Noble Niner), the fact that it had any experience at all made it a favorite on Board 8, at a little better than 2-1 on the Guru and 5-1 on Oracle predictions, including at least one person who said straight-out in the Oracle Discussion Topic that they had Nioh in their bracket but their bracket was trash anyway so they were hoping that it was their Oracle pick of BoI:R that was correct. The casuals? Well, they were upset, too, but not nearly as badly as the Gurus. 43.53% of brackets had this match correct, so while they too were ultimately wrong more than they were right, they correctly saw this as a debatable match.

And let's face it, winning with 56.53% qualifies as "close" in this contest. I'm honestly not even sure why I'm still making Oracle predictions under 55%; I suspect it's to mitigate disaster when I know I'm picking against the majority.

Match 40: God of War vs. The Talos Principle

God of War 19480
The Talos Principle 3460

I really don't want to talk about this match.

No, seriously, I really don't want to talk about this.

I got this right in Guru, of course. Everyone did. And at 94.81%, it was second only to Breath of the Wild in prediction percentage among the casuals, too. Was I under some delusion that God of War was no longer popular here? Did I accidentally mistake the Talos Principle for something that might have anything remotely resembling strength? Or was I just not paying attention?! Because honestly, there is no good excuse for being more than 10 points behind the second-worst Oracle prediction when you're not predicting an upset or even a threat of one. This match has single-handedly convinced me to start keeping tabs on what I put into Oracle for every match and adjusting them if I think I messed up. Predicting 61% for a match where the actual winning percentage was nearly 85% can do that to a guy.

Even without the benefit of being an established franchise, God of War's genre is much more of an asset this contest than it seems like it would've been in years past. That was just such a huge blunder on my part that I actually went to check my Guru to see if I'd screwed anything up in later rounds. Then I remembered what its next opponent was/would have been. Yes, it turns out, I am in the majority that picked God of War to make Round 4 and then lose. I just had a major stupid when it came to