LogFAQs > #939672387

Round 1 Division 8 Day 15
Uncharted 4: A Thief's End 41.15%
Mario Kart 8 58.85%

Prediction Percentage 56.02%

This was one of them more debated round 1 matches of the contest. Not because it necessarily split the board the most, but because it was widely agreed that the winner of the match would advance all the way to round 3. Uncharted 4 is a big game and they have proved themselves to be alright in the past. Uncharted 2 advanced to round 3 in the contest we had a decade ago. The fourth one sold by far the most. Most of the discussing however centered around Mario Kart 8. Mario Kart 8 appeared in the latest Best Game Ever and got stomped by Super Mario 64 in round 1. It looked very weak back then, but it was also in a match that could be filled with SFF, so it was hard to tell. Racing games are historically worth just about nothing on our site, but Mario Kart is different from the norm and is this not really hurt by it. Its similar to how Smash Bros has always been good despite being a fighting game. Now it has been released on the Switch to become one of the best-selling games of all time. It was largely thought to be best Mario Kart of all time, although people like us will probably insist on Mario Kart 64 being so. It had a high ceiling, but a low floor.

Mario Kart 8 ended up being a favorite by a solid margin. The previous contest, Character Battle X, taught us to go with the Nintendo character in a debated match. This seemed like the same thing. This time, even the overall site favored Mario Kart ever so slightly, which is probably partially because experts make up a bigger portion of the brackets, but also because Mario Kart 8 has been one of the biggest casual games of the decade. I think it has some amount of casual bait in itself, so good thing that worked out for some of them for a change.

Seriously, Uncharted 4 got screwed by bracket placement as much as you possible could. Even at the time of the match where most of board thought Uncharted 4 is weaker than it ended up being, it was unanimously agreed that Uncharted 4 would easily beat every other #13 seed in the bracket. Mario Kart 8 is so far from the second strongest of them. The second best might just be Tales of Berseria. That doesnt sound much like an achievement, so lets look at the other perspective. Because on the other hand, Mario Kart 8 looks good enough to be able to upset every other #4 seed too, except for Super Mario Galaxy 2, but including Horizon. Super Mario Galaxy 2 looks like it had a case for being among the eight strongest games, so thats hardly a bad thing. Mario Kart 8 is easily the most underseeded game in the entire bracket and Uncharted 4 was the poor game to get screwed by that. It could beat a lot of games that made it to round 2 with relative ease.

It took most of the contest before people accepted Mario Kart 8 is actually really good, so at the time Uncharted 4 was thought to be really weak. Some people were thinking Mario Kart 8 had no chance against Final Fantasy XIV next round and that this was just Uncharted 4 being trash, because the match was over right away. Mario Kart 8 won the board vote big time, it looked like it would go for a doubling for a moment before eventually calming down. Im not sure if theres some general Naughty Dog backlash going on. This was before The Last of Us 2 has leaked, but it was still not exactly the most popular company.

Mario Kart 8s inclusion seems to show that Mario spin-offs were not counted when considering the expected series cap of two games per franchise. Its a good call too. It would be weird not having such a big game in the bracket. Galaxy 2 and Odyssey are both among the greatest received games of all time, they both had to make it in as well. Besides, Mario Kart alone of doing better than almost all series today, usually selling better than the platformer Mario on the same console. On the other hand, Uncharted 4 got in a high seed while Uncharted 3 did not. Im sure this has been used as potential evidence of Uncharted 4 being weak by some, but its really just another snub a result of the game coming out in the game it doesnt really belong to. Its similar to God of War III in that regard. You dont think of Uncharted 3 as a 2010s game when its part of an early Playstation 3 trilogy.

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Guinness Book of World Records is the name of the diary that belongs to azuarc, the winner of the Game of the Decade II guru contest.