Board 8 > my 5 best and worst picks in contest history

(+) Yeah! (+)

I guess everyone had a bad time.

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I'm curious to see what my best and worst picks are now.

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BEST #3: Dark Souls over MGS5

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain 44.6% 16633
Dark Souls 55.4% 20662
TOTAL VOTES 37295

The GameFAQs audience is extremely slow to move on to new franchises, even more so than the general public. Franchise voting means is a real thing here. As a result, one of the hardest picks to make is taking a new-ish franchise against a major game from an established franchise. Sunshine vs. Halo 3 was one example of this, sure, but Halo was a proven franchise with at least some level of respect.

Dark Souls? It's a critical darling, sure, but it had never proven itself in any kind of notable way. Meanwhile, MGS5 was a pretty big deal. It had just come out and was also a critical darling, with tons of glowing reviews. It wasn't really a "gamefaqs game" though, meaning that it was loved because of its gameplay as opposed to the narrative trappings that made Metal Gear such a hit here. Still, it was Metal Gear, and Dark Souls was an obtuse, challenging game that went out of its way to screw you over. It was basically the opposite of the Nintendo games that we usually flock to.

I went with Dark Souls without thinking twice. MGS5 just never seemed like our jam and I have a lot of respect for Dark Souls (to the point where I think it has an outside shot at the finals this year). It would have been much more satisfying to pick SOTC over the more popular Metal Gears, but alas, I'm not that good!

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Yeah, I didn't have that one at all! Probably the biggest upset I was out front on was Mass Effect 1 > Mario Galaxy 2. Also, apparently Sonic 2 > Portal 2 was the upset pick in the Guru! I didn't remember that being the case.

but yeah my 2015 bracket kinda sucked even when you don't include rallies

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actually looking at it my 2015 bracket was my best finish by the pure numbers of any Guru I entered

although I would've finished top 5 if I had entered in 2007...!

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2015 was one of the worst brackets I've ever made and one of my best finishes ever. Rallies bailed me out left, right and centre even though I had absolutely no idea any of it would happen pre-contest. No bracket with Mario 64 in the finals had any right to be Top 50.
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My worst was predicting Red Bird to advance. (To be fair I worked at Family Dollar at the time, and Angry Birds merch sold really well, so I assumed it was really popular)

Also, totally forgot Golden Sun has a character named Felix. That got 47% on Master Chief. I forgot about that. I also think Golden sun is the most over rated RPG ever so, yeah.

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My best pick was following the LAW in GOTD1. My worst pick was taking TP over MM in that regard, since I coulda freaking won. (The guru, anyway.)

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I had Squall over Luigi in 2003. (My brother had Ratchet over Luigi o_O)

I didn't really post much that year, but I remember everyone complaining about something I thought was obvious.

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I still get a small high every time I remember I had Knuckles > Magus

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WORST #3: Aeris over Zelda

Zelda 56.87% 71597
Aeris Gainsborough 43.13% 54300
TOTAL VOTES 125897

Let's go into a time machine. Once upon a time, we had this concept of "balance" between Square and Nintendo, where they would theoretically go back and forth. Link won 2002, Cloud won 2003, FF7 won Spring 2004, Link won 2004 and 2005, FF7 won that silly "top 10 games" thing in 2005, etc. The one thing that could stand up to Nintendo was our the Final Fantasy VII.

Then the Series contest came and Zelda somehow beat Final Fantasy. In fact, FF almost lost to Mario en route to a fairly embarrassing failure. Twilight Princess hype was outrageous at this point as the Wii was barreling towards us. Smash Bros. was the strongest this site has ever seen with the advent of the Snake/Brawl trailer, a trailer which nearly won him an entire contest.

That leads straight into the 2006 character battle, where we had a female bracket. Samus was the clear winner (until she almost wasn't), and the only real Square and Nintendo battle was Zelda vs. Aeris. It was pretty obvious though after that Series battle. Nintendo had taken the reigns and was the clear top dog, and 14 years later it hasn't come close to swinging back to anything resembling "balance".

And taking that all into account, I picked Aeris. Why? Because, get this, Final Fantasy XII was releasing on the day of the Zelda/Aeris match. The ghost of Mario/Cloud was still strong and there was the suggestion that maybe contest history would repeat itself. Of course, that situation is completely unique and no release, not even FF7 Remake, could recreate the conditions of that match. But still! This was the one chance to bring balance to the force. Yeah.

Aeris lost, and lost bad. She lost so bad that Yuna, who she would face in the next round, scored almost exactly the same percentage. Meanwhile, Tifa led Samus for hours thanks to a ZSS picture, and probably also because Tifa was just straight up more popular than Aeris. That debate has been settled pretty much ever since even though the situations have never really been fair. Aeris had a promising start to her contest career but has pretty much sucked relative to expectations ever since Tifa finally made the bracket in 2005. This pick wasn't the worst blowout or anything but it was an exceptionally stupid pick.

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So far I've matched 2/3 with your best picks, and 2/3 with your worst picks. (I did not pick Golden Sun over GTA, and I did not pick Sans over Pac-Man)

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BEST HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Xenogears > Pokemon GSC - This one was honestly more satisfying than a good pick, but it deserves mentioning. It is so easy to not take the baby Pokemon game against the "cult RPG" (it's a Square RPG on this website which disqualifies you from being cult if we're being honest). This one was doubly rewarding because it ran on consecutive days due to a glitch that only let registered users vote - and then I think it won bigger the next day. ahhh, it's still so good 16 years later.

Brawl > Melee - so here's the thing about Melee or bust fans: they're loud and they're real obnoxious. (nobody cares now, but then, yknow) They also had a really good point - Brawl fans would vote for Melee but Melee people would slit their throats before voting for Brawl. Head-to-head, it was impossible to say, but there was a real reason to go with the original over the game that was so reviled amongst the right (wrong) people. Brawl winning was also super satisfying for those that had it because it was such a headache to deal with for months and it made people legitimately hate the website for a day.

KH2 > KH - Nothing special here. It just felt good to be right about a debated match in the minority. I wonder how this goes today.

Fire Emblem > WWF No Mercy - look, I picked Sans over Pac-Man. It's probably a worse pick than No Mercy over Fire Emblem. Oh wait, no it's not, because this was an N64 wrestling game over a Nintendo game with a fanbase. This looks stupider the further we get from it, and it was stupid then. I'm not ever letting this go.


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transience posted...

Fire Emblem > WWF No Mercy - look, I picked Sans over Pac-Man. It's probably a worse pick than No Mercy over Fire Emblem. Oh wait, no it's not, because this was an N64 wrestling game over a Nintendo game with a fanbase. This looks stupider the further we get from it, and it was stupid then. I'm not ever letting this go.

You'll get no sympathy from transience.
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FIre Emblem > No Mercy was one of the funniest days on this board.

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I had all of those picks except for the last! I'm trying to figure out what year beat out of me picking Square over Zelda at every opportunity.

Brawl > Melee still feels good because Melee fans are the worst. What they did in 2015 was worse than what Undertale did!

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Obviously No Mercy would have done better if it was a night match!

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If the match was rerun today, how plausible is it to get wrestlers to rally on social media?
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Team Rocket Elite posted...

If the match was rerun today, how plausible is it to get wrestlers to rally on social media?

Anyone of real name value might be difficult to get through all of their mentions, but not completely impossible, especially since AEW is in talks on bringing that engine back.

Also, Kenny Omega would totally shill an Undertale re-rally.

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Special Honorable Mention: L-Block

So yeah, obviously I didn't pick L-Block to make the finals. I did pick it to beat Laharl but that's no big deal. That was the guru favourite because Laharl sucked.

No, the reason that I put L-Block here is that I was one of the first converts. I picked every L-Block match correctly in the Crew/Oracle/whatever except for one, the semifinal where seemingly the entire internet was alerted to L's presence after it beat two noble niners and one potential NN breaker.

L's run probably seems like an obvious bandwagon in retrospect but it actually wasn't in the moment. Those who were infused with years of contest history had the hardest time accepting that our idols were vulnerable. After all, we'd spent years digesting extrapolated statistics for breakfast. The idea that Link, or the Noble Nine for that matter, was untouchable was just a fact of life. You believed in the LAW and that was that.

Here was our 7-person Crew's record on the Block in 2007. We're never actually brilliant, but, yeah

Kirby/L/Laharl/Hale: 4-3
Kratos/L/Kirby/DK - 2-5
Snake/L/Kratos/Riku - 6-1
L/Snake/Sonic/Squall - 1-6
L/Snake/Chief/Dante - 0-7
L/Link/Cloud/Snake - 1-6

So yeah, I always considered this one of my best moments, even if my bracket obviously never had a chance of predicting this one. Other fourpack matches, even the game contest, don't even enter my thought process when thinking about the best picks because those were always weird anomalies that depended on the opponents. But 2007 L-Block was obviously different.

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transience posted...

BEST #5: Golden Sun over San Andreas

Golden Sun 53.69% 30920
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 46.31% 26674
TOTAL VOTES 57594

This one wasn't unthinkable, but it was still super satisfying. GTA already had a history of.. let's call them questionable results, starting with CJ losing to Ness in 2005, but those were character battles. Vice City put up a serious result on Melee back in 04 and Vice City beat Metroid Prime in a weird 09 match. San Andreas came in last in 09, but it was a really tight poll of midcarders where no one got more than 27%.

Meanwhile, Golden Sun is a GBA game for babies. Its most memorable performance was some dude named Felix pulling 47% on Master Chief -- a clue for how this match might go with favourable circumstances. Round 1 came and Golden Sun put up a higher percentage on Ratchet & Clank than San Andreas did on Dead Space. At that point, the writing was on the wall, but it was still a GBA game vs. one of the biggest games of the decade, if not all time.

This match ended up not really being that close, but it still felt great to get right.

I'm more shocked people were shocked about that result

Golden sun was fucking huge when it came out. I know because i've been on this site since early 2000's and very few Nintendo RPG's had as much hype and praise as Golden Sun 1/2, Think of Xenoblade now but much bigger.

HAd Golden sun had more games on consoles and even the Switch there would be NO debate on Nintendo's #1 traditional RPG series. IT would be way more popular than Fire Emblem.


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KamikazePotato posted...

FIre Emblem > No Mercy was one of the funniest days on this board.

And yet one of the saddest

No Mercy is legit one of the best Wrestling games of all time.

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I don't know when I accepted that L-Block was going to win. It might have even been as late as the first five minutes of the final...!

I know I declared Undertale the champ after it completed the comeback on Mass Effect 3 though!

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Yuri_LowelI posted...

I'm more shocked people were shocked about that result

Golden sun was fucking huge when it came out. I know because i've been on this site since early 2000's and very few Nintendo RPG's had as much hype and praise as Golden Sun 1/2, Think of Xenoblade now but much bigger.

HAd Golden sun had more games on consoles and even the Switch there would be NO debate on Nintendo's #1 traditional RPG series. IT would be way more popular than Fire Emblem.

Not to mention that to this day, Isaac is STILL one of the most requested characters for Smash, and with K. Rool and Ridley finally checked off the list, he may be THE most-requested Nintendo-owned character that still isn't on the roster.

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I was looking at the Oracle results.... you got the #1 pick in Snake/L/Sonic/Squall match, trany.

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yeah, and #2 in another L-Block match, I think the Kratos/Kirby one. I did well with that stuff but scoring formulas on fourways were pretty much garbage.

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I definitely know Sonic > Crono and SotC > MGS2 are my best picks ever. I went hard against the board on those.

Actually, I did surprisingly well last contest since I went with the assumption that Smash Bros. would boost Cloud back up to being #2 on the site.

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Honorable Mention for worst picks:

Super Metroid over LTTP (2004) - this one would be top 5 worthy if it wasn't more of a "hey, Super Metroid is the best game ever and therefore should win best game ever" kind of pick. I didn't even follow through on that since I had it losing to FF6 the next round anyway. 2004 games had to be my worst bracket without question, even worse than if I had done a bracket in 2002.

SF2 over Mario RPG - I mean, it was a board meme so I included it, but it really wasn't that bad of a pick outside of the margin.

Vivi over Zelda (2005) - you could substitute just about Nintendo match from 2005 here. I went with this one because I really bent numbers trying to convince myself this could be a thing, and then the Nintendo boost happened and it went really poorly.


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Nintendo won every Square vs. Nintendo match in 2005 that FFVII wasn't involved in. What a bad contest.

I think my worst pick from 2004 was Tetris > Legend of Zelda. Everyone has played Tetris, so it has to be super popular, right?

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Actually, I might look into most painful picks that almost panned out. I've got a lot of those, too!

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me too! one that immediately comes to mind was Xenogears > KOTOR which was a huge stretch but kinda almost happened, relatively

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i think I took Charizard over Mega Man because Zero was also in the match, what a mistake

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The legendary Pokemon rallies that couldn't get past Mega Man holding a lead weight.
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the whole Charizard saga that contest was a trip.

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Charizard and Mewtwo are two of this contest's biggest frauds.

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Hmm, speaking of Nintendo vs Square in 2005, I think one of my best picks ever was Kirby > Tidus that year. With the board heavily in favor of Tidus, I took the gamble and it paid off. Of course I blew it in the very next match by taking Ryu > Bowser, but hey, it was fun to be right for a day.

Incidentally, I also correctly called DK > Tidus in 2018 against the opinion of the board. In conclusion - consult me for Tidus' matches from now on.

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My Dream Division was a nightmare because I had Tidus and Ryu.

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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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Heck yeah, this one would be high up on the list for me, too. Probably #2, actually!

Somehow Sub-Zero > Master Chief was literally the greatest round 1 upset of all-time in terms of prediction percentage, even lower than Starcraft > Halo. It might still be! I think Sub-Zero only had like 20% of brackets.

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LeonhartFour posted...

Heck yeah, this one would be high up on the list for me, too. Probably #2, actually!

Somehow Sub-Zero > Master Chief was literally the greatest round 1 upset of all-time in terms of prediction percentage, even lower than Starcraft > Halo. It might still be! I think Sub-Zero only had like 20% of brackets.

Missingno

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DoomTheGyarados posted...

Missingno

Even Missingno had more!

Missingno had 21.94%, Sub-Zero had 20.28%

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If Vivi > Mario/Ganondorf happened in round 1, the percentage of correct brackets would have been much lower than 20%. As for 1-on-1 matches, Paper Mario > WoW would likely have been below 20% if in R1, too.

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if that vivi match happened in round 1 the contest wouldn't have fallen off the rails into a ditch yet and mario would have won

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Haste_2 posted...

If Vivi > Mario/Ganondorf happened in round 1, the percentage of correct brackets would have been much lower than 20%. As for 1-on-1 matches, Paper Mario > WoW would likely have been below 20% if in R1, too.

well yeah but those types of matches normally aren't in round 1 although Paper Mario had 14% in round 2 so it'd have probably been higher than 20% if it had happened in round 1

but really the anomaly is that B8 usually doesn't get suckered in by Master Chief to such a degree

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Leonhart4 posted...

Charizard and Mewtwo are two of this contest's biggest frauds.

Pokemon strength is inconsistent bar Pikachu. Basically theyre Jokes that people will vote for for the lulz.

Remember Squirtle>Cloud?

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Yuri_LowelI posted...

Pokemon strength is inconsistent bar Pikachu. Basically theyre Jokes that people will vote for for the lulz.

Remember Squirtle>Cloud?

Pokemon pick up bandwagons really easily for whatever the reason

they also seem to get really lucky draws most of the time

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LeonhartFour posted...

well yeah but those types of matches normally aren't in round 1 although Paper Mario had 14% in round 2 so it'd have probably been higher than 20% if it had happened in round 1

but really the anomaly is that B8 usually doesn't get suckered in by Master Chief to such a degree

Of course, Chief vs. Sub-Zero is pretty much why that is the case, along with Halo vs. Starcraft.

And the first one probably wouldn't have burned us that bad had we not been taken in by the Liquid/Frog/Chief trio in 2004.

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Well, what burned people so badly was thinking Sub-Zero and Scorpion would be basically the same, like transience said, which made absolutely no sense. If you played MK at all growing up, you knew Subby was the #1 dude.

transience and I tried to warn everyone the whole time!

but then you had people like Lopen who believed Master Chief was capable of 10,000 vote day vote swings with the right opponent...!

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