(1)Fallout 3 vs (2)Super Smash Bros. Brawl 2010

Ulti's Analysis
Sandbag ZERO, Big Boss vs Colossus, Brawl's Fallout, Santa's Naughty List and Eternal Diablo and Toon Deity are in my opinion the five best pictures of this contest, with honorable mentions going to FPS Samus vs Gordon, INTO YOUR SOUL, GSKart and Brawl's Cast vs Majora's.

Not many 54-46 matches are interesting, but Brawl was not supposed to struggle with Fallout 3 here. Like, at all. If you look at oracle PREDIX, not many people had Brawl getting under 55% here.

And yet it happened. Early on, Brawl was over 60%. But then after the freeze, it started going down. And down. And down. And down. It just kept on going down bit by bit overnight, and then Europe's vote hit and it kept on going down even more. Fallout even started winning updates on the regular. It wasn't going to pull off any crazy comeback attempts, but it just kept on shooting off percentage one limb at a time.

But hey, crazy stuff can happen late in contests and Brawl still had that godslayer morning + afternoon vote, right? After all this was the start (FINALLY!) of 24 hour matches, so Brawl was bound to go way up and escape this rut it was in. Brawl was down below 54% come morning, so it really had nowhere to go but up.

And, well... you can all see what happened. Brawl's nadir this match was 53.82% at 10:30 in the morning. Yes, 10:30 in the morning when Brawl started ripping Melee a new one 6 hours prior a couple rounds ago. On top of that, with the morning and afternoon vote in its back pocket, Brawl increased a grand total of 0.61% throughout the rest of this match. Fallout 3 holding up well during the day would have been impressive enough as-is, but holding up this well during Brawl's best time, the time frame that allowed it to crush every game up to and including Melee and Zelda, was really something else. This ranks right with Mass Effect's loss to Portal as the best loss of the whole contest, and it was good foreshadowing for what would end up happening to Brawl in the final.

Weird things always happen late in contests, but it would be disingenuous to wholly credit that for why Fallout 3 did so well. Voters get really smart during the final week, and they knew the final four games were Nintendo, Nintendo, Square and Bethesda. Unless you believe Game of the Year polls translate to contests (lol), this was one of those matches where voters were sending a clear "We're sick of Square and Nintendo always winning" message. But unlike years past, their numbers are rapidly growing and making a difference. Nintendo and Square being so bad for so long have really made an impact on people, and in 10 years you might see the equivalent of this match go the other way.