Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Mushroom Division Final |
|---|---|
| Match # | 27 |
| Match Date | Friday, July 28th, 2006 |
| Vote difference | 29,147 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Super Mario Bros. - 69.10% 122 for - 6 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Super Mario Bros. - 62.89% (29,054 brackets) |
Peach not getting into Mario's side of the match pic is a crime.
Anyway, WHAT an awesome performance by SSB here. Normally I call matches like this complete blowouts, but this one is different. With the exception of the few people that actually expected SSB to win this (equivalent to that one guy in every fantasy football league that misses the draft and sends some lackey with a half-ass list to draft for him, then whines about his team sucking the day after), most people expected Mario to flat-out kill SSB via the SFF bug. Smash almost breaking 40% is nothing short of a complete shock. Even funnier is that after the day vote when Mario was about to break 64.5%, Smash came back and sliced nearly 3% off of the percentage. It was clinic in how to avoid SFF by Smash if nothing else. Pre-contest, there were many debates about what the fourth strongest series would be. No one expected Smash to actually take that spot, especially after facing Mario in a match that many expected to be an 80-20 SFF killing. All talk of Mario perhaps upsetting FF pretty much died during this match.
But it's a testament to the fact that Smash may very well be the last casual appeal that Nintendo has in the gaming market. Nintendo's accepting the place of profitable third place and alienating third party developers (in large part due to said developers knowing that they can't compete with first party Nintendo titles on Nintendo systems, so they go elsewhere), not to mention the girly look of the Gamecube and the odd nature of the Gamecube controller has a lot of casual slash "jock" gamers going elsewhere for their needs.
With Smash however you rarely see it lumped into all of the complaints. I've heard every other major title on the Gamecube labeled as kiddy crap and/or flat-out horrendous by casuals, but not Smash. The worst thing people ever call Smash is a party fighting game, which says a lot about its staying power.
If this match were held pre-SSBM, we probably would have seen the 80-20 SFFing that everyone expected. But for whatever reason, the massive popularity of SSBM allowed SSB to resist this. Call it rSFF or whatever, but the proof is in the numbers. There is supposedly massive, near-linear overlap between the two series, yet SSB wasn't SFFd to hell. I credit this to SSBM being the last thing Nintendo has done that actually appeals to casuals (save Metroid Prime), but if you have any other reasons I'd love to hear them. I'm sure your guess is as good as mine.
Match Trends[]
