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| - Now THIS was a match. But before delving into the obvious, Sonic 3 deserves a mention for how badly it bombed here. A lot of people expected Sonic 3 to place in a match or two, and perhaps be the strongest of the three Genesis Sonic games this contest. Knuckles is the fan favorite of the series, and Sonic 3 always does well in favorite Sonic polls and board contests. But when Sonic 3 was put into its very first match, it sucked. There's no way of sugarcoating this. Two SNES games clearly splitting votes each broke 35%. That's embarrassing if you're expected to be strong, and this in turn made Street Fighter 2 and Sonic 1 look like complete crap. As for the part of this match that mattered, it was a barn-burner softened only by the format. With both games guaranteed to advance no matter what, the typical tension seen in close matches wasn't really there. In fact early on, there was nothing happening here at all. Super Metroid built up a 600 vote lead on Mario Kart overnight, and all the chatter about this match was how badly Sonic 3 was sucking it up. The match was close, but Super Metroid didn't exactly look uncomfortable. Then the dead night and morning votes hit, and it was on. Mario Kart chipped away at Super Metroid's lead all the way until the DSV (during school vote) started, and pushed Super Metroid's lead below 200. Super Metroid recovered during this time, but the game winning the morning vote usually catches fire during the after school vote, to the tune of swinging a couple thousand votes sometimes. Except this time, something really weird happened. Super Metroid looked like it would recover and easily win the DSV, but it was actually Mario Kart that made a push here. Once Metroid pushed its lead to 250, Mario Kart pushed back and used the DSV to get the lead down to 0. With winning the morning vote and DSV, it looked like Mario Kart would rock the entirety of the day vote and win this going away. But nope, this match was completely backwards. It was actually Super Metroid rocking the ASV, and it slowly built its lead back up to 270. It looked like Super Metroid had the match won here, but... nope. The second half of the very ASV Metroid was winning went in Mario Kat's favor, and it back to even by 6. This was about the weirdest close match ever, with trends going totally backwards from conventional wisdom. Metroid only won half the night, lost the dead hours and morning vote, blew the DSV, then... won the first half of the ASV? Before Mario Kart took the ASV's second half? Really, really strange. Metroid flew out to a 100 vote lead from here, but Mario Kart again came storming back to even things. The match stayed virtually deadlocked within 50 votes for a couple hours, but then the evening vote hit and Metroid made yet another move. It pushed itself out to a 250 vote lead by 11, and given how easily Metroid got its initial lead out to 600, it finally looked like this match was over. Yet inexplicably, Mario Kart won the final hour by 100 votes. Super Metroid won the match on paper, but this would be one hell of a 1v1 match after all the nonsense these two pulled on each other. There were of course a lot of cheating accusations, and given Bacon's topic during Battletoads of all things, we all expected a word from him. But nope. Nothing. Either this was legit, or Bacon doesn't care about telling us the numbers are or are not legit for every close match. I'm leaning toward the latter, though I've been told several times in private cheating is next to impossible these days. I'd love to believe this, but that Mario 3/Zelda 1 50 vote spike makes you wonder. This was a wonderful match that would have been a perfect 1v1 duel, but we'll take what we can get in a contest devoid of successful comeback attempts. As for what this tells us, Nintendo games are just whacky. There's no explanation for how some games split 80-20, but others go 50-50. I also think this cemented Super Mario Kart's status as the strongest Mario Kart title, though I think some might argue in 64's favor there.
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