(8)Rock Band 2 vs (9)Deus Ex 2010

Ulti's Analysis
One day. It took only one, specifically 12 hours, for everyone to start with their cries of THIS CONTEST. Conventional wisdom went out the window 5 minutes into the second match when Deus Ex made it clear it would make a game of a match widely expected to go in Rock Band's direction shortly after the release of Rock Band 3. Then the 10 minute update hit, the match became a boat race and once again we were struck by the Second Match Jinx. This joined the ranks of Morrigan > Spyro, Ness > CJ, KOS-MOS > Diablo/Arthas, Zidane > Shadow and Alucard > Magus as matches that just totally tripped people up. There's a couple other low prediction matches in there like Fox > Pikachu and Sigma > Andross, but the board was actually on the right side of those so I won't count them.

The final score seems close, but it really wasn't a close match. Deus Ex had a 1000 vote lead in a couple hours, but only barely lost the ASV. This led to Rock Band shaving votes for the rest of the match but never really making a game of it, hence the final margin being a comfortable 752.

But don't tell that to Deus Ex's fans, who deserve a Turkey Fanbase of the Contest award for how they handled themselves here. Even though Deus Ex was winning, a ton of topics got made by Deus Ex fans about how it wasn't winning by enough. There wasn't such a whiny fanbase of winners before or since, and hopefully we never see it again. That was embarrassing. What actually happened here were outsiders voting, seeing a close match and being disappointed by the margin without looking up the trends. So I can see how one could get worried or something, but it's really not hard to look around for 30 seconds and see what's going on. They got made of for the rest of the contest after this stunt, deservedly so.

There was a bigger meaning here, of course, which is the rhythm game fad being over and done with. The games were all going to be weak anyway, but it's nice to see a match where the site moves past them for good. Given how the Guitar Hero series was ruined and Rock Band fans are some of the most pretentious people in all of gaming, it was a welcome death knell and a well-deserved loss. And no, I'm not an anti-rhythm game person. I'm an anti-annoying people person who hates having to sing on Rock Band at every single party because of my having a good singing voice. Seriously people, can we play something else? >_>