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GameFAQs Second Annual Character Battle
Kirijini writes "GameFAQs' Character Battle has begun again. Over the next two months, the 64 most popular videogame characters will duke it out for your votes in a popularity contest that is, to my knowledge, the largest event of this kind on the internet. This is like the People's Choice Awards for videogame characters, so be sure to get your vote in! Last year had some pretty tense battles." The poll currently in progress has Pikachu up against the dangerous Fox McCloud, so get voting.
Great use of the internet.
Pretty Pictures!
I have quite a treasure here in this Horadric Cube for anyone that can get Kain on the list...
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Stay a while and listen...
So-so implementation. There seems to be a very heavy slant towards the jRPG genre: Tidus, Magus, Squall, Kos-mos, Isaac... and that's just in the "north" division! Of course some of these spiky-haired heroes should be represented, but there are PLENTY of better characters that should have made it in there instead - I would personally have loved to see Antonio Malochio (Interstate '76) or Ivy (Soul Calibur) thrown in the mix. Both have oodles of style, flair, and personality.
That said, I'm going to do my best to send Captain Olimar to the top. Go Olimar!
While I think there's been a lot of sarcasm so far in this topic, this poll is truly an amazing thing. It brings out the most rabid fan support anyone has ever seen.
In particular, last year, there was one poll between Mario and Cloud Stryfe (from Final Fantasy 7) and Cloud had the initial lead. Then planetgamecube.com put up a news item about the character battle and things started to balance out. Suddenly there was an outcry of how unfair that was for the Cloud supporters and votes started to surge on other sides. Rumors of people going into IRC channels just to say "Vote Cloud" or "Vote Mario" ran rampant.
It was as if these things truly mattered.
In the end, Mario won that particular poll. A few days later, Mario was up again, but this time against another Square character, Crono from Crono Cross (Trigger? I've never played either. I'm not a big RPGer).
From the start, the two were neck and neck with Crono having a slight lead most of the day. Then votes swung back and forth wildly up until almost midnight EST, not because it was over, but because CJayC had noticed some cheating on the Crono side and penalized Crono 300 votes (there were so many votes on both sides that it's hard to believe cheating wasn't rampant on both sides, but a serious bulk of votes were caught from one source and removed).
Outrage ensued from many and Mario finished again with a win.
2 days later, Link went on to beat Mario soundly and win the contest altogether in the finals. Link never even had a close match. Hopefully this year, the ending will be just a little more exciting.
Overall, it's a great big flame inducing mess most of the time, but that's always good too. It's nice to see people getting excited as fans, even if they take it a little far.
"If the good lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates." -Willy Wonka
No Garret, from the Thief series? Maybe he's hiding in the shadows.
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
Everyone who's complaining about the list of entrants should know that they were all voted upon by the site's users. Before the contest started, you could send in about 10 characters that you would like to see appear. Only the characters requested most frequently got in.
Spinning Bird Kick indeed. You know, when you pause it just right, oh yeah......
They should just replace all the FF characters in there with their basic FF archtypes instead:
Spikey haired loner hero man
Hot chick with long brown hair
Jovial doofus buddy
Cheerful ditz
Some sorta guy that is/resembles an animal
Perhaps, but which one (Or even which ten) of the hundreds of fighting game characters would be nominated? Even if fighting games are as popular as you say, the individual characters are not nearly as popular as the game itself. Last year, only one fighting game character even made it past the second round last year: Scorpion (Alas, poor Ryu, forced to fight Samus in the second round).
The only three fighting game characters in this year are Ryu (The "star" of the Street fighter series, if there ever was one), Ken (A Ryu clone who's in because you need someone to be the 15th seed to lose in the first round) and Scorpion (The only reason he's in is because of his record last year)
Last year, there was a "Kane" in the tournament, and while people were making their NCAA-style brackets, he was consistently mistaken for either Deckard Cain (Diablo), Kain (Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver), or Kain (FF4), and perhaps a couple other people who's name sounds like Cane. Alas, it was the Command and Conquer Kane (The guy who only shows up on a TV), so he sank like a rock in the first round.
It's dominated by console game characters because people who visit GameFAQs play console games a LOT more than PC games. Try looking at the Top 100 requests sometime. Also, PC game sales are much lower than console games, so it makes sense.
Not only do RPGs have FAQs and walkthroughs, people will get obsessive and write in depth FAQs about each of the minigames in an RPG, and on how to find/train/create the best characters, and on how to get the most powerfull items, and anything else that they feel isn't covered well enough in the main FAQs.
I don't know enough fighting games to know which to check, but most have two or three main FAQs, a character FAQ for each character (which all seem to be just a plain subset of what's available in the main FAQs) and a half-dozen or less in depth FAQs. FFX for comparison has 17 main FAQs and about 75 more specialized FAQs.
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