Results[]
Friday, April 10, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Division 8 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 60 |
| Match Date | Friday, April 10, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Mario Kart 8 - 55.75% 52 for - 7 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Mario Kart 8 - 56.02% |
| User Votes |
Uncharted 4 - 3507 Mario Kart 8 - 5210 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Uncharted 4 - 3125 Mario Kart 8 - 4067 |
People really need to stop nominating these Uncharted games and characters to such high seeds. Death, taxes, and Uncharted blowing a match as a high seed. Well.... sometimes. Nathan beat Pac-Man back in the day, and Uncharted 2 has had some success. But when he botches a high seed, he botches it badly. In 2010, he was a 2 seed and lost to The Boss. Two years ago, he was a 4 seed and lost to Tails.
This year Uncharted was yet again a high seed, and everyone with sense knew how this match would go. It's a shame, too, because Uncharted is a good series and all things Mario Kart are garbage. There is no defense whatsoever for any gameplay mechanic that either renders player skill irrelevant or punishes it for existing. And that gets to be the nonsense to take advantage of Uncharted losing as a high seed yet again. Puke. Doesn't surprise me though, because Mario Kart 8 is possibly the most popular and well-respected game in that series. It is in no way affected by the Wii U curse, as this contest showed.
The true shame of Uncharted is that it's a victim of Misbehaving Canine going full SJW and alienating most of its player base. SJWs don't care about diversity, either, because they want everyone thinking like them. They act exactly like republicans did in the 1980s -- useless trash who censored and shut down everyone they didn't like, then acted all miffed when the country hated them for it. Trust me. I've lived through both. If you consider yourself an SJW, just know that you have the same exact mentality as people who thought AIDS was divine punishment for gays.
Did you guys know the original writer at Naughty Dog was a woman, and an exceptionally talented woman at that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Hennig
Skip to "Works". There are no bad games on that list. Zero. Uncharted 2 especially has a lot of contest success, in large part because of her writing ability.
But no, let's fire her, redo Uncharted 4 from scratch, crunch our employees because we're total pieces of trash, and allow crazy people to write for us. Colin Cowherd has a saying I love -- "Don't let Twitter produce your show, because only 6% of the country actually uses it. Twitter doesn't matter". The companies who allow Twitter (or Tumblr, or ResetEra, or whatever other SJW trash rag you want to name) to produce their content all fall out of favor for a reason.
Ergo, Uncharted 4 can't win any contest matches anymore. It doesn't stop there, either. Uncharted 4 was only the beginning of this mess. Just wait until we get to what happened with The Last of Us.
Considering Uncharted 4 ended up on the top third of the x-stats, I don't think it was particularly weak compared to the rest of the field? Mario Kart 8 was just shockingly strong.
"Ergo, Uncharted 4 can't win any contest matches anymore." is blatantly false. It would've comfortably advanced against every other 13 seed and beat a lot of higher seeded games. -Surskit
A fair rebuttal. Time will tell!
Ctes's Analysis[]
This was one of them more debated round 1 matches of the contest. Not because it necessarily split the board the most, but because it was widely agreed that the winner of the match would advance all the way to round 3. Uncharted 4 is a big game and they have proved themselves to be alright in the past. Uncharted 2 advanced to round 3 in the contest we had a decade ago. The fourth one sold by far the most. Most of the discussing however centered around Mario Kart 8. Mario Kart 8 appeared in the latest Best Game Ever and got stomped by Super Mario 64 in round 1. It looked very weak back then, but it was also in a match that could be filled with SFF, so it was hard to tell. Racing games are historically worth just about nothing on our site, but Mario Kart is different from the norm and is this not really hurt by it. It’s similar to how Smash Bros has always been good despite being a fighting game. Now it has been released on the Switch to become one of the best-selling games of all time. It was largely thought to be best Mario Kart of all time, although people like us will probably insist on Mario Kart 64 being so. It had a high ceiling, but a low floor.
Mario Kart 8 ended up being a favorite by a solid margin. The previous contest, Character Battle X, taught us to go with the Nintendo character in a debated match. This seemed like the same thing. This time, even the overall site favored Mario Kart ever so slightly, which is probably partially because experts make up a bigger portion of the brackets, but also because Mario Kart 8 has been one of the biggest casual games of the decade. I think it has some amount of casual bait in itself, so good thing that worked out for some of them for a change.
Seriously, Uncharted 4 got screwed by bracket placement as much as you possible could. Even at the time of the match where most of board thought Uncharted 4 is weaker than it ended up being, it was unanimously agreed that Uncharted 4 would easily beat every other #13 seed in the bracket. Mario Kart 8 is so far from the second strongest of them. The second best might just be Tales of Berseria. That doesn’t sound much like an achievement, so let’s look at the other perspective. Because on the other hand, Mario Kart 8 looks good enough to be able to upset every other #4 seed too, except for Super Mario Galaxy 2, but including Horizon. Super Mario Galaxy 2 looks like it had a case for being among the eight strongest games, so that’s hardly a bad thing. Mario Kart 8 is easily the most underseeded game in the entire bracket and Uncharted 4 was the poor game to get screwed by that. It could beat a lot of games that made it to round 2 with relative ease.
It took most of the contest before people accepted Mario Kart 8 is actually really good, so at the time Uncharted 4 was thought to be really weak. A few people were thinking Mario Kart 8 had no chance against Final Fantasy XIV next round and that this was just Uncharted 4 being trash, because the match was over right away. Mario Kart 8 won the board vote big time, it looked like it would go for a doubling for a moment before eventually calming down. I’m not sure if there’s some general Naughty Dog backlash going on. This was before The Last of Us 2 has leaked, but it was still not exactly the most popular company.
Mario Kart 8’s inclusion shows that not all Mario spin-offs were not counted when considering the expected series cap of two games per franchise. It’s a good call too. It would be weird not having such a big game in the bracket. Galaxy 2 and Odyssey are both among the greatest received games of all time, they both had to make it in as well. Besides, Mario Kart alone of doing better than almost all series today, usually selling better than the platformer Mario on the same console. On the other hand, Uncharted 4 got in a high seed while Uncharted 3 did not. I’m sure this has been used as potential evidence of Uncharted 4 being weak by some, but it’s really just another snub a result of the game coming out in the game it doesn’t really belong to. It’s similar to God of War III in that regard. You don’t think of Uncharted 3 as a 2010s game when it’s part of an early Playstation 3 trilogy.
By the end of the contest, Uncharted 4 ended up looking really good, Mario Kart 8 simply ended up looking way better than anyone had imagined it was capable of. I was defending this game a lot throughout the contest and I feel pretty proud for seemingly having had the correct read on it in the end. There are those that will probably still calling it a bust for being a high seed that dropped its round 1 match in a chalky bracket, but that’s quite unreasonable when it’s solely because of Mario Kart 8 being underseeded and many other games would have done the same.
It seems like the general idea now is Uncharted 2 was pretty good, but the others weren’t as big and Uncharted 4 didn’t improve on the formula enough, so it wasn’t remembered as well. I mean, sure, there are surely parts of the internet that thinks so or we wouldn’t have the discussion, but Uncharted 4 was big in every way and you can’t deny how it was here 4 years after its release. IT was huge in reviews of both critics and users. It has sold more copies than any other Playstation 4 game. It also wasn’t supposed to improve upon the formula. It was created as the final entry in series to draw a conclusion to the story of Nathan Drake, and that’s exactly what it did. Besides, it’s not like the game just used the same gameplay, it’s better than the other games in the series and The Last of Us too, it’s just not as big as jump, but why should the fourth game in a four game story be that?
GameFAQs has always been less interested in the series than most. People seemed to firmly believe that Uncharted 2 would easily be the strongest of the Uncharted games. I disagreed from the day of this match and claimed that I thought the fourth game has a chance of being the strongest and that I don’t think the difference is all too big. Uncharted 2 got the most outside praise, but Uncharted 4 sold better and fans aren’t really as settled on 2 being the best one as some people want to make it seem like. Plenty of fans prefer 3 or 4. My idea was mostly laughed at back then, but on the other side of contest, it sure looks like I was right.
We can’t tell for certain, but let’s compare to the games that made both the 2015 and the 2020 contests. We obviously won’t use stuff like Witcher 3, Xenoblade Chronicles or even Mario Kart 8, which everyone can see boosted a lot. Compare them though Fire Emblem: Awakening or Borderlands 2, which have about the same distance to each other in both contests. Uncharted 4 looks better. Compare through Bayonetta 2 and Uncharted 4 looks better, and that’s even when believing Bayonetta 2 was SFF’d a lot this constant and keeping it constant. Compare through Civilization V and Uncharted 4 looks better. Compare through Minecraft and they’re about even, but it’s widely agreed that Minecraft was underrated in the 2015 stats. Compare through Shovel Knight and Uncharted 4 looks better, and sure, Shovel Knight is hard to read properly this contest, but you can see where we’re getting at.
Even if you somehow want to say that all of that is within the uncertainties and it doesn’t prove anything, it sure as hell indicates that if the games are much different in strength, it’s in favor of Uncharted 4 and there’s not much else than gut feeling to tell us that Uncharted 2 should be stronger. There is no way for it to be by a lot. You can argue that some of the games I mentioned has reason to decline, but not all of them, and you can argue that for Uncharted franchise just as well. How a direct match between them would end is another discussion, but basically everything reasonable you can put on the table points towards Uncharted 4 not only holding up indirectly but looking straight up better.
Part of the board wanted to call Uncharted 4 a bust, but it’s the opposite if anything. Everyone I’ve talked to about this claimed it would be way weaker than another entry from its series and it wasn’t at all. It exceeded our expectations and it’s a darn shame it’s complete lack of luck in bracket placement prevented it from getting a match where it could upset something. I don’t know what this board has against it, but whatever it is it sure isn’t a general opinion, not anywhere, but not even on our own site. Whatever happened with Naughty Dog was after this game came out. Uncharted 4 is a good game, and I’m glad it would end up showing it was good enough in the end.
Safer777's Analysis[]
This match was somewhat debatable but I don't see why. Has ever Uncharted games/characters do good here? No. We have MK 8 here(seriously how many MK games are out? Damn!) and even though it seems that after so many games MK series would have fallen over actually it is doing extremely well! I am shocked too. But then again when so many sequels of a game come out it is bound to be good and sell well. As for the Uncharted series I do believe that U2 is still considered the best. But all of them are good anyways.
So for the match. Well MK did as most of Board 8 expected. A hard win. Seems casuals got it somewhat right too even though the highest seed was U4. So that is. We just don't like games like Uncharted here people. When you will learn? I want to say something else too. When the Uncharted series first came out everyone was saying it was a clone of Tomb Raider which okay made sense. BUT after the rebooted Tomb Raider series came out, everyone was saying it is a clone of the Uncharted series! So we have a clone of a series that was a clone of another series that got rebooted and is now a clone of the cloned series? Or something? So yeah we went full circle I guess!
Tsunami's Analysis[]
This match was debated for all sorts of silly reasons, most of them stemming as to whether voters would see it strictly as "Mario Kart 8", the Wii U game, or if they'd see it as both Mario Kart 8 and its update Switch version, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Because of course, voters will anti-vote anything associated with the Wii U. Uncharted has never been that strong here; Nathan Drake managed a single first-round win in 2013 against Pac-Man and Steve from Minecraft, but is better known for coming in 4th place in his debut despite having CATS in his fourpack and then later becoming the first 2-seed to lose in round 1 in a format with 16-character divisions (though we'd had 8-1 upsets in the 8x8 era, so...) As for the games themselves...er, the game itself, Uncharted 2, went two rounds in GotD, beating The Legend of Dragoon and Street Fighter IV, before losing to Halo, then beat out The Walking Dead in round 1 in 2015 before losing to Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Neither Uncharted nor Uncharted 3 have ever been in a contest. No, Uncharted wasn't even in the vote-ins for the first GotD. (Uncharted 3 would've been in this one, not that one.) Honestly, this feels like a really bad result for MK8. I honestly wasn't that concerned about having blown two matches in the same day because unlike the Bravely Default/Ni No Kuni disaster, at least my wrong calls would both be R2 losers anyway, but after seeing MK8 held under 59% by UC4 while FFXIV was putting up over 71% on NecroDancer, I'm not so sure anymore! Obviously MK8 had the stronger opponent, but was it by enough to account for that big a difference?
Though it should be noted that at 55.86% correct, this was the most debated match of Round 1 with the casuals, narrowly edging out Nioh's upset of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth which 56.01% of brackets had incorrect. (Note: Apparently some brackets got banned or something, because the correct prediction percentage for a bunch of early matches went up since I wrote these reactions. BoI:R-Nioh is now the biggest toss-up, as Nioh's prediction percentage is now above 44 while MK8's is above 56.)