(4)Team Fortress 2 vs (13)Fable 2010

Ulti's Analysis
On the second day of this contest, one day after a real big one with Deus Ex upsetting Rock Band 2, we had a match that just blew everything out of the water. Team Fortress 2's 37 vote win over Fable was an all-timer marred only by how meaningless the match was and how early the match happened in the contest. As I write this, Majora's Mask is finishing up an outstanding comeback/upset over Final Fantasy X. TF2 holding on here was nice, but in the end it was a one point match. This would have meant much more is each game came in with a head of steam or something. Just to put this in perspective, Majora upsetting FFX was worth 32 points.

That said, what a freaking outstanding match this was. Team Fortress 2 had a tiny lead early, Fable erased it and we were off to a complete war of attrition. The old record for closest wire-to-wire match was Frog vs Liquid Snake way back in 2004, where neither character led by more than 460. That record would get shattered here. It didn't take long for the match to become a deadlock, but this is actually where Fable went wrong.

GameFAQs doesn't like Fable much, which was its first mistake. Molyneux sucks at making games, but Fable got by on this site due to being an RPG. It's all over the match picture, too. But the more pressing issue here is Team Fortress 2's fanbase and bracket supporters were never going to let it lose a close match. Fable needed to blow it out to win this, and it couldn't do it. So what ended up happening for a solid 12 hours was one game building a minor lead and the other coming back super quickly. It was like the 5 minute updates version of Chrono Trigger vs Link to the Past from 2004. Someone, I think Alec, tracked all the updates for this match but I unfortunately didn't save them. The numbers are pretty hilarious to look at, though, for when he finally gets around to posting them somewhere.

Team Fortress 2 actually ended up winning the ASV almost every single hour, including building up a peak lead of 210 at one point to shatter Frog's record, but Fable would come back every single time. With 90 minutes left the two games were a measly 5 votes apart, and this is about when the TF2 fanbase kicked into action. They got this thing up to 92 with only 40 minutes left, and kept their foot on the gas until match's end. Fable made one final comeback attempt, but obviously it fell short. Most games struggle to get 100 votes in the final hour of a poll. Both of these games were pulling 150s out of their ass in an attempt to out-rally the other.

For all we know Fable is the stronger game neutrally, but there was no possible way TF2 was losing this match close. Not with that fanbase. I want to feel bad for how Fable lost this match, but then I think back to Thanksgiving, where my father in law was playing Fable 3 and farting in people's faces all over the kingdom, and realize the correct game won this match. You can have a legitimately good, fun game with funny characters winning, or you can have a series that resorts to toilet humor winning. For this match, GameFAQs made the right choice.