(7)Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty vs (2)Shadow of the Colossus 2010

Ulti's Analysis
It must be done for the sake of fairness: HAW HAW GURUS. We suck.

First and foremost, I firmly believe Shadow of the Colossus wins this match a lot easier if it isn't faced with the biggest picture disadvantage of the entire contest. That's the Snake picture that allowed him to score like 2000% on Sora, paired up against god-knows-what-that-is on the SotC side. I'm the biggest MGS2 fan there is, and even I think it would have been highway robbery had it finished the deal and won close. That picture is beyond unfair, though thankfully SotC would get it all back in future images, not to mention winning this match in the best way possible.

People kept expecting me to lose my s*** over Shadow of the Colossus's run this contest, but there was honestly no reason to. When you follow contests for the better part of a decade, anything that destroys the norm this hard is awesome. I won't magically like the game or anything (unless the HD treatment is kind to it), but this contest convinced me to finally stop bashing it all the time. The game deserves some respect, you know? Ngamer gave me surprise Inifdel of the Week for being so classy about this match, which was one of the funniest bits of the season on the podcast.

And finally, for my money this was the third best match all contest behind Majora's final two. Brawl/Melee was a letdown, TF2 > Fable only meant one point and no one cares about the Persona 4 fourpack of bore. But this set off the contest's Cinderella run, and with the perfect storm to boot. Even with that awful picture, SotC was able to hold serve because of a multitude of things -- three MGS games in matches in two days, MGS2 being so mixed with whether people want to like it or not, and a clear contest title boost. If you looked at the MGS and ICO matches prior to this, there was no reason for SotC to win. But it did.

More than that was the way it won. After MGS2 got a minor early lead, SotC came back and took over. With how bad the entire MGS series is during the day, it was clearly in for some trouble. But for whatever reason, SotC was unable to take full advantage for the longest possible time. Before long, the poll was a war of attrition and this actually favored Metal Gear Solid. MGS almost always seems to pull out these 13th hour "rallies" to win matches, so the longer this stayed even, the more it favored MGS.

I'd go into how nuts the whole day-long deadlock was, but we have graphs and update charts for you to see that yourselves. No reason for me to get into drawn-out, boring narratives about it. Though at almost every turn, there was this sense SotC was getting ready to build this massive lead. At one point it seemed like this would actually happen, during the evening of all times. The evening and second night votes are when MGS usually takes off, yet SotC was the one able to go bonkers during this time frame. I say "bonkers" because it was able to build a lead of 188 votes, which is our new closest wire-to-wire record.

There was one other hilarious note to make about all this stuff, which is what happened at 5. SotC had a lead of 97 votes, and MGS2 then won seven straight updates without taking the lead. Then SotC just hovered there for awhile before the evening vote push.

We all know what happened from there, MGS2 whittled down the lead like clockwork with the second night vote, looking once again like it would pull a phantom undeserved win out of its ass. And then slow cutting turned into a 50 vote swing with 30 minutes left, which might have been MGS2's biggest mistake. Had MGS waited until the final couple updates to make a big push like it always does, it might have survived here. But taking the lead with such a long time remaining gave SotC the chance to counter-rally and prevent MGS from building any sort of lead at all.

And then over the final 7 minutes, Shadow of the Colossus laid down the boomhammer to win this thing. Outstanding win from what is honestly a more deserving game than MGS2 given the contest's title. Seriously. It was also nice to see MGS feel the sting of a 13th hour push, for once. I love the series, but those close wins all going one way gets old. Let MGS fans feel cheated, for once. With this match and MvC2 rallying past Mario, we've now seen every big entity in contests FEEL THE BURN. And yes we're stuck turning to some awful Wii title to make sure Mario feels screwed over. Sad, isn't it? I also do feel like Link losing in 2003 to Cloud and 2007 to L-Block counts, just to make sure everything comes full circle.

It was an outstanding match, plus Shadow of the Colossus wasn't done after this, and on top of all that the casuals totally embarrassed us here. I love being a guru, but it's nice to see us crap out now and then in a big match. Also, check out how close those battle stats are. That has to be the contest's closest, right?