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| - Did you ever think you'd see Tifa in not one, but two match pictures in the same contest in which her boobs were smaller? Unbelievable. Anyway it was finally time for division winners to all go at it, and the quarterfinal round set the tone for what would grow to be arguably the best contest stretch run ever. At the very least, it was the best two weeks we've seen since Spring 2004's Starcraft madness. And it was all thanks to Samus's worst match ever. Sure Samus completely tanked against Mario last year, but I'll never concede that that match wasn't bound to happen from day one. Besides, plenty of people saw that coming. No one saw Tifa being the closest character to breaking the Noble Nine (editor's note: other than Bowser, though only by raw totals), nor did anyone think that Samus woul
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| - Did you ever think you'd see Tifa in not one, but two match pictures in the same contest in which her boobs were smaller? Unbelievable. Anyway it was finally time for division winners to all go at it, and the quarterfinal round set the tone for what would grow to be arguably the best contest stretch run ever. At the very least, it was the best two weeks we've seen since Spring 2004's Starcraft madness. And it was all thanks to Samus's worst match ever. Sure Samus completely tanked against Mario last year, but I'll never concede that that match wasn't bound to happen from day one. Besides, plenty of people saw that coming. No one saw Tifa being the closest character to breaking the Noble Nine (editor's note: other than Bowser, though only by raw totals), nor did anyone think that Samus would be the character on the ass end of this. Holding off on the theories for a moment, this match didn't start all that bad for Samus. Oh and I'm sure I should mention somewhere that Ceej asked Board 8 (seriously, "Board 8"; Ceej should just change the board name and get it over with) for a Kingdom Hearts 2 Tifa pic mere hours before the match, so considered it mention'd. In the first few minutes of the match, Samus jumped out to a rather unimpressive early lead, but had an early lead regardless. 2005 stats say that Samus should have come close to breaking 60% here, but her biggest percentage early on was 57%. Regardless, it just meant Tifa doing better than expected. Surely, Samus couldn't actually lose <_< During the Nintendo Power Hour, Samus showed early signs of her eventual struggle. A quick glance at the updater reveals three stalls in Tifa's favor during a demographic that Nintendo had been dominating since the poll time switch, and on top of this Samus was anything but impressive. She bled percentage like mad en route to her 700 vote lead through the first 60 minutes, but made an excellent recovery over the next 30 minutes in adding another 150 to her lead. After two hours, Samus's lead neared 900 as the dead of night neared, and it seemed as if Tifa's minor scare would fall well short a la Sonic > Tifa in 2005. Yeah, whoops. After a minor struggle between the two early, the night vote favored Tifa by a fairly wide amount. The two stalled a lot, and then Tifa would randomly have 50 vote updates. Tifa's momentum grew very constant as the night vote progressed, and she shockingly tied the match before the morning vote ever showed up. On top of this, Tifa went on to build a lead of 200 before said morning vote came into play to save Samus. After another long stall between the two, Samus finally gained some momentum and erased Tifa's lead. Samus began building a lead of her own, which reached ~750 before school began. Tifa made a decent push at regaining control of the match during school hours (she brought the lead down below 400 at one point), but anyone who has paid attention all contest knew what was bound to happen once school let out. Samus made a huge after-school push to seal the match away. Samus's biggest lead was around 1700 votes, though Tifa sliced 300 off of that before closing time. Samus may have won the match, but anyone who says she didn't bomb like hell here is out of their mind. Check the stats topics; nearly all of the posts were about how much Samus sucked during this match, especially given that she was the overwhelming favorite to win the entire thing. Now, the door was open for pretty much everyone left. What's even funnier is that had Vincent been in Tifa's place, the Noble Nine would have croaked. Vincent > Tifa > Aeris is about as clear-cut as it'll ever get (barring future Kingdom Hearts appearances) given this contest's results, but that's a whole different scenario for another time. Nintendo has been ripping the hell out of Square since 2004, yet here we have a rather flagrant statistical outlier. The factor of choice is the match picture, which I've always found rather bogus. The same people who blame Samus's choke job on the match pic are the same people who give SSB/M most if not all the credit for Samus being elite at all. That said, everyone who loves SSB/M knows the name "Samus Aran" and thus renders most of that argument moot. In fact, most SSB nuts know full well who Zero Suit Samus is by now. For the match pic to have made nearly 10% of a difference, the entire blame would have to be on a damn large chunk of Metroid fans not knowing who "Samus Aran" is without her suit on. It's a theory that makes some sense, given how often (see also: not much) Samus's name is seen in the series. But 10% of difference? Something else was up. Ceej made a topic post-match about how the stuffed votes (none of which were counted, though I suppose that all depends on how good you think the security methods are) about how the cheated votes would have easily given Tifa the win. I actually don't have the topic saved, but I'm sure TRE will show up minutes after this gets posted and do his computer thing <_<. On a side note, can you imagine the uproar had Ceej allowed the votes, then waited until the match was nearly over to remove them? On the off-chance that Ceej actually reads this, you should totally do that the next time a close match has a ton of cheating in it. You know you secretly love making the board go nuts :) Personally, I think Samus tanking against Nintendo characters has more to do with her than it does Nintendo. I'm willing to bet that there's a certain degree of "Mid-1990s SFF" if you will in regards to Samus. Super Smash Brothers was the only game Samus appeared in between 1994 and 2002, and it's not like the people on GameFAQs aren't well-rounded enough to ditch a character they may only know from SSB/M and some Metroid Prime titles and a few handheld titles once a heavy-hitter from that eight-year period shows up in a match against her. Aren't most people on GF too young to remember Super Metroid? Hey, at least that theory makes more sense than "lol I like character A more but her match pic sux so i'm voting character b even though i normally would have voted A normally, and plus i'm too stupid to know the name of a character i luv xoxo". Or maybe Tifa just had the match of her life and there is no real explanation, who knows. Oh, right.... MOTHER ****ING LOL X-STATS. Speak of the devil:
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