Donkey Kong vs Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! vs Space Invaders vs Tetris 2009

Results
Round One Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Stats and Analysis
The contest started with a heavily debated match between Donkey Kong and Punch-Out, and we quickly learned SFF or LFF or whatever FF you want to pin on four-ways would not be as big an issue as initially predicted.

Tetris was obviously going to murder this match, and Space Invaders was obviously going to get destroyed -- old-school SFF and just generally being weak can do that -- so the true fight here was between Donkey Kong and Punch-Out. Though there was a pretty even split here, the basic idea revolved around LFF. Either Donkey Kong would get LFFd by Tetris and be stronger than Punch-Out anyway, or Punch-Out would stick out like a sore thumb and score second place due to... sticking out like a sore thumb. It's a debate you can repeat for nearly any four-way match, but it was meaningful here. DK and Tetris are probably more "Nintendo" than Punch-Out, so it was reasonable to think Punch-Out could benefit from not only this, but hype from the Wii version of Punch-Out artificially inflating the original's strength.

In the beginning, this poll was very close and unpredictable. DK and Punch-Out fought a very close duel in the early parts of the poll, but DK eventually seized a small portion of control and built a 100 vote lead once the madness of the first hour ended. DK then pulled a typical "slowly build a lead as the other game stalls you a bunch" thing overnight, before losing 300 votes in something like 3 updates once the morning vote hit.

This of course started all the "DK is a choker, knew this was going to happen" stuff, so naturally Donkey Kong went on to easily win a match when everyone expected him to lose. That's just how DK rolls. He lost his whole lead when the morning vote began, then started exploding. The only reason people continued paying attention beyond DK's second wind is because everyone always expects DK to choke a close match away, but nope. Not this time. Donkey Kong of all games turned a close match into a fairly easy 53-47 win. Close, but not a nailbiter.

Now despite DK winning this match, I truly do think Donkey Kong is more prone to old school Nintendo SFF than Punch-Out at the hands of something like Tetris. The problem here is Punch-Out is plain weak. I doubt this result changes if you held it even right now, after the release of the most recent Punch-Out. Not even a sports game (which is basically what Punch-Out is) can take full advantage of the DK Chokes-A-Lot Factor.