Lurker > red sox 777

PW1's one of those games that's difficult to rank based on "Would it beat this highly ranked game?" because it's one of the more unstable games in the contest. Yes, PW1 could very well beat FFVII, but I think it'll lose to more games than FFVII will at the same time.

Not all games are made equal for these purposes. Notice I said the game that would get the most wins against the top 25. Stuff below that matters too, but less. If the Red Sox for some reason can't beat the Blue Jays (and based on the past week and a half, it seems they can't), I'm not going to hold it against them too much as long as they can beat the Yankees, the opponent that actually matters for their championship chances. Ability to beat the very top (contenders for strongest game) is big (though FFVII does have this in spades on Board 8 too, along with an uncanny ability to lose to much weaker games). FFVII and PW are pretty similar in that regard.

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90s games > 00s games

It was fairly obvious that PW1 was going to be upset by something down the line and sooner rather than later.

Again, nobody was surprised TTYD beat PW1.

And it happened later, not sooner. First it won 13 straight.

Everything in its currrent area (around #15) should get upset by top 30ish games occasionally. A number of them have losses to Super Metroid, which is probably also in the same area as TTYD.

Where I had it before isn't much more demanding, as I didn't have it ahead of any elite games. (I did change my mind this week about MGS's status as an elite game)

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90s games > 00s games

Why? I'd take PW to beat every game I have below it. And probably FFVII too, that matchup on Board 8 just screams PW victory. You're free to disagree, as I am free to disagree with your opinions.

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90s games > 00s games

What's ultimately determinative for me is what I think would happen in the future. I take two games and ask myself, which game has a greater than 50% chance of winning if they played now? Whichever it is gets ranked higher. Of course it's somewhat more complicated than that because of A > B > C > A loops, so the question is really more like: which game would win more games if it played the top 25, on average?

So, for FFVII/OOT, which would I take in a rematch? OOT. It was a very clear win that confirms 8 years of history on this board, and 6 years on this site. It's probably closer now and FFVII could win but I'd have to predict OOT. FFVII gets a higher rank because there are games I think it would likely beat that OOT wouldn't. But no, I don't think it's managed to move beyond that loss.

Also, I disagree that recent stuff should be weighted much more heavily than stuff at the beginning. Most of the apparent shifts are probably just random variation. In baseball August results are no better (possibly slightly better) than April results for predicting how September will go.

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90s games > 00s games

But the games just below that all have embarassing losses. FFVII got nearly doubled by OOT, FFVI has 4 losses, etc. PW may not compare to the top 10, but to fit into the bottom of the top 10 doesn't require it to be better than those games.

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90s games > 00s games

I don't have it ranked in the top 10 this week, because it just lost to an unranked game.

I don't think my previous ranking was unreasonable. Based on the Melee win alone, PW looks like a top 3 game. When it beat Melee, it was a top 1 performance as Melee was the defending champ. I don't give too much credit for losses, but very narrow losses to games ranked around #5 should be good for #15 or so. So average #1 with #15 twice......and you get around #10. Then add 13-0 against weak competition. Doesn't really change things.

By last week, I had PW below all of the other elite games (I think I actually had it at 11, because I think MGS is the strongest game I had it above). And the next group of games, after MGS, is notably weaker.

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90s games > 00s games

Well yeah. That's the benefit of not losing- you can watch as games above you fall behind. That's the just reward for winning 13 straight.

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90s games > 00s games

Struggling against middling games is good evidence of that change. There's more to "evidence of any change" than losing.

The voters actually slowly moved PW's ranking up, not down, over the course of those 13 straight wins. I was part of a very small minority in insisting in ranking a 1-2 game in the top 10. Most voters saw the 13-0 against weak competition as better than the 1-2 against elite competition, and therefore they slowly moved PW up. I didn't really think so, so I very slowly moved it down from, 7-8 down to 10, as I said before.

And the most recent evidence outweighs what happened at the beginning of the season. It's why I don't have a problem with War ranking SOTN now after it's won several matches in a row and is far above .500 when I did have a problem with him ranking a .500 game just because it performed well in defeat.

I never had a problem with anyone ranking SOTN, and my opinion of it is pretty much the same as it used to be, maybe slightly better. SOTN was handed an unwinnable schedule early on.

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90s games > 00s games

Not really. PW1/Melee isn't a reliable match, as most people (including you) seem to recognize, because very few people were actually ranking PW1 over Melee for any significant length of time, even when they both had two losses for the longest time.

I do recognize it as an important match. That's the reason I put PW in the top 10 for so long, and it's why I didn't put Melee up to #2 until recently (after it crushed SM64 at least, and IIRC I didn't put it up to #2 for some time after that). Of course these games have played many other games, so the direct PW/Melee will not be solely determinative of where I put them. That doesn't mean it's not important.

So nothing can change over 13 weeks? PW1 not performing up to a Top 10 level for 13 straight weeks after 3 good matches to start the season doesn't warrant a re-evaluation?

Lots can change, but if there's no evidence of any change, the presumption is that there hasn't been any. And I haven't seen the evidence up until this week's loss of that. It's 13 wins......the games in the next group (starting with FFVII) aren't even that strong.

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90s games > 00s games

Well, PW has slowly slid down my rankings over those 13 weeks from #7 or 8 down to #10 by past week. But I attach a lot more weight to big matches, because they're more reliable and I have greater confidence in my evaluation of their strength. I shift games around a lot when I get new information about them that disagrees with the old information by a lot. PW had a very impressive win and 2 close losses against top tier competition, and then 13 unremarkable wins. If it didn't manage to blow out some weak game, it's not going to impact my evalutation of it- that new information is not worth much compared to what we already had.

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90s games > 00s games

Not regularly performed up to caliber? After starting 1-2, PW then went 13-0. What more do you want for it to keep a position at the bottom of the top 10? If I'm supposed to drop PW out of the top 10 for going 13-0 against lackluster competition, then what do you call people ranking RE4 at #2 for being 17-0 despite having zero top level opponents?

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90s games > 00s games

After facing Melee, SMB3, and SMW early, and going 1-2 with those, PW did not lose again until this week. So why would I penalize it for not losing? Going 1-2 against top 10 games should get you to the bottom of the top 10, and that's where it stayed on my list until this week.

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90s games > 00s games

That is a big punishment for PW. I've ranked it in the top 10 every week before.

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90s games > 00s games

Ugh, so it won't get much of a challenge then. It will be difficult for Melee to make its way to #2 in the rankings.

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90s games > 00s games

Question: Is RE4 scheduled to face any top 10 games before the tournament?

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90s games > 00s games

Gotta punish SMB3 some- it doesn't have much in the way of big wins to compensate for this loss. However, there's only so far it can fall as there's a good amount of distance between the top 10 or so and the next group with the Final Fantasy games. MGS is 16-1 though, so it moves up into my top 10.

1. Chrono Trigger
2. Super Smash Bros. Melee
3. Super Mario 64
4. Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow
5. Resident Evil 4
6. Super Mario World
7. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
8. Super Mario Galaxy
9. Super Mario Galaxy 2
10. Metal Gear Solid
11. Super Mario Bros. 3
12. Final Fantasy VII
13. Final Fantasy VI
14. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
15. Final Fantasy X
16. Final Fantasy IX
17. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
18. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
19. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
20. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
21. Paper Mario
22. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
23. Portal
24. Star Fox 64
25. Mario Kart 64

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90s games > 00s games

Well, as long as the Rays and Yankees lose too.....

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90s games > 00s games

...What's wrong with this team. I checked in 7 hours ago and thought they had a won game, and then they blow it. At least the Rays lost to.....the Orioles. Now if the Yankees lose to the Mariners today, well, that'll move us one step closer to Detroit Tigers > AL East. They'd be 3.5 back of the Yankees for best record in the AL if the Mariners hold on.

Boston is now 2-8 over the last 10. The two games that we won.....we won by scores of 14-0 and 18-6, for a total of 26 runs. The 8 games we lost, we lost by a combined 27 runs.

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90s games > 00s games

Yeah, we get the vast majority of noms early within the first week.

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90s games > 00s games

If the Tigers beat an AL East team in the playoffs, or both, we're going to look pretty stupid.

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90s games > 00s games

And Extha is right to be worried if he supports Obama for reelection. A rising tide for one of the parties lifts all boats. Obviously it isn't the only thing voters care about, but it's extremely important. An urban NYC district going Republican is pretty shocking, as it probably went something like 80-20 for Obama in 2008.

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90s games > 00s games

My point is more to try to emphasize to you that an R and a D next to someones name is virtually meaningless in these days. Without knowing anything about the candidates involved, there's a more than halfway decent chance the guy who won is fairly consistent with your ideology, ESPECIALLY if he's another Scott Brown.

On the contrary, votes in Congress usually follow the party lines very closely these days. Especially on the Republican side, they almost never vote against their own party. Scott Brown is actually the rare exception who thinks for himself instead of just going with the party line all the time.

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90s games > 00s games

What do the 3 braches of government do? Um....the Supreme Court makes the law, the President interprets the law, and Congress does nothing?

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90s games > 00s games

Goldwater did plenty bad. Candidates also have differences besides how conservative they are- Reagan was charismatic and his opponents weren't exactly strong candidates.

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90s games > 00s games

If Mitt Romney can win the Republican nomination, he can win the general election. Smuffin, the general electorate is not more conservative than Republicans.

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90s games > 00s games

Finally won a game. Runs scored last 11 games:

0, 12, 4, 0, 14, 10, 4, 2, 5, 1, 18

It's all or nothing with this team.

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90s games > 00s games

#14 Final Fantasy X (Tanooki Blitzball Conference)
#12 Final Fantasy VII (Fanservice Conference)
Wild ARMs (Fanservice Conference)
Mega Man X (Fanservice Conference)
Assassin's Creed II (Patriot Time Portals Conference)
Civilization IV (Sonic Overload Conference)
Gitaroo Man (Thousand-Year World of Sunshine Conference)
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo (Smash Trigger Conference)
Tekken 3 (Twilight Barrel Galaxy Conference)
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (Patriot Time Portals Conference)
Shadow Hearts (Cult RPG Galaxy Conference)
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening (Zelda Overload Conference)
Battletoads (Brawl for Broke Conference)
Batman: Arkham Asylum (Metroid Eater Conference)

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90s games > 00s games

Certainly it is a horrible feeling. But that's what the Red Sox were all about, and it was fuel both for the fanbase and the rivalry.

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90s games > 00s games

Bad, but FFVII's already lost to lots of stuff on this board, so I wouldn't be shocked or anything.

The thing is the Red Sox have been good continuously since their last losing season in 1997, too.

1998: Lost in ALDS
1999: Lost in ALCS
2003: Lost in ALCS
2004: Won WS
2005: Lost in ALDS
2007: Won WS
2008: Lost in ALCS
2009: Lost in ALDS

The major gap is 2000-2002, but even in those years Boston was in the playoff race until late in the season.

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90s games > 00s games

Part of the reason the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry seems omnipresent that the teams haven't been bad for a long time. The last season neither team made the playoffs was 1993.

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90s games > 00s games

We have too much regulation. I'd say to deregulate and raise taxes on corporations.

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90s games > 00s games

That's impossible, as CC is a far far far better game than Brawl.

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90s games > 00s games

No, CT/Brawl is not a rivalry. Ugh.....the idea is nauseating. You have to have respect for a rival, or else you just feel terrible about your side.

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90s games > 00s games

I wouldn't really be upset if CT lost to CC. Now, Brawl.......that's a game I couldn't stand if CT lost to.

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90s games > 00s games

CT is plenty beatable. The argument was about the principle of what makes a good rivalry!

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90s games > 00s games

Haha I was just thinking that that 's how I feel as a Link fan. The feelings of fear and horror I felt when Snake was leading Link for 6 hours early in the 2008 final must be what Yankees fans felt. It actually made me care much less for the Patriots; couldn't generate much emotion to root for them when they won that much.

But with Link......I think that 2008 final made me root for Link a lot more. Prior to that, it just hadn't felt competitive in years, but that match really brought out fear. It wasn't like with L-Block, which was a joke and couldn't actually be stronger than Link; Snake was a real character.

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90s games > 00s games

Um, I meant that you were wrong about what makes a good rivalry, not that Chrono Cross is a good game. I like Chrono Cross too (granted, not as much as Trigger).

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90s games > 00s games

And you should know better than anyone about one-sided rivalries, what with your account being named after the Red Sox!

How many championships did the Yankees win between 1918 (I think this is the year, though I may be mistaken) and 2004 compared to Boston?

Before 1918: 5-0 Red Sox
1919-2003: 26-0 Yankees
Since 2004: 2-1 Red Sox

Heck, even during years when BOTH teams were bad, this was considered THE rivalry in baseball.

I don't think it was, actually. I know both Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium had horrible ticket sales in the mid-60s (Yankees were outdrawn by the Mets for years, as hard as that may be to believe, and Fenway had attendance of 8,000 for the season opener in 1967). The media likes to milk it for all it's worth and more.

And did Yankees fans really fear the Red Sox before 2004?

I always wondered about this one, actually. Whether the rivalry was actually real from their side, or it was a construction by Boston fans and the media.

Or did Red Sox fans really ever have hope?

Absolutely. Every year, a season was considered a failure unless the Red Sox won the World Series. And it wasn't really unwarranted, because the Red Sox did field good teams for a long time that got very close to winning.

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90s games > 00s games

War, you're just flat out wrong. Wrong!

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90s games > 00s games

One-sided is fine, but it has to leave room for hope and fear. That's as competitive as it needs to be, to make the matches interesting. It's not a very high bar to get over, but it's absolutely essential that it does.

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90s games > 00s games

No, because we feel that there's a chance that Brawl could win the next time. The requirement is for competitiveness, not for actual balanced results. Brawl has won Yoblazer's poll every time, but it continues to be interesting and a rivalry because each time the poll is held again, there is hope on the Melee side and fear on the Brawl side.

CT/CC would generate almost zero hope on the CC side and almost zero fear on the CT side.

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90s games > 00s games

And not with CT/CC! If that's supposed to be a rivalry, we may as well get rid of rivalry week.

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90s games > 00s games

No, it's not sufficient, but it is necessary.

SFF is not sufficient, and not necessary (nor does it preclude a rivalry). CT/CC is in no way a rivalry. There's a strong argument for leaving CT/SSBM to the tournament, and I'm not really opposed to not setting it up for a rivalry week. But rivalry most certainly and emphatically DOES NOT MEAN SFF.

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90s games > 00s games

Chrono anything has never faced Smash Bros. anything, so there's no connection there. They weren't from the same era. They aren't the same genre. You can use the "Nintendo vs. Square" argument, but that umbrella is so broad that I don't like to use it.

The connection doesn't have to be in the form of actual matches. Red Sox/Cubs would have been an amazing matchup prior to 2004, and they never played each other for decades. Though in that one, it probably wouldn't have qualified as a rivalry because the aspect of antagonism was missing.

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90s games > 00s games

No. Strength alone isn't enough either, unless the strength is to a high enough level that it forces a connection (such as Link vs. Cloud, where they're strong enough that they necessarily meet in the finals each year). Oklahoma and Alabama are not at that point, but if they met in the national championship, say, 2 years in a row, they would be.

CT vs. Melee has a lot of things going for it outside of both being strong games. As I said before, it's Nintendo vs. Square, Day vs. Night, and Old vs. New. Nintendo/Square itself may be enough to call this a rivalry, because Nintendo vs. Square is by far the strongest rivalry we have in contests (the site contests, not this one).

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90s games > 00s games

It's okay if one side always wins, but it has to be competitive. That is, it has to feel like the other side has the chance to win. And there's got to be antagonism; CT/CC is a bad rivalry because there are very very few CC fans who dislike CT. A rivalry means that you have to root against the other side.

I disagree strongly with the idea that SFF implies rivalry. It doesn't. SFF matches can be rivalry matches, but they certainly don't have to be, and lack of SFF is no bar to rivalry at all. You need a connection, but the connection could come from anywhere.

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90s games > 00s games

CT vs. CC is not a rivalry, it's just SFF. Bacon would probably agree that it is a rivalry though, given his bracketmaking history. You need a connection plus an interesting matchup to get a rivalry. I don't think it's particularly hard to have a connection if an interesting matchup exists (there must be a reason that it's interesting, after all).

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90s games > 00s games

Oregon would be such a red state but for Portland. You look at the map and 90% of the state is covered in red.

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90s games > 00s games

On the other hand, an interesting match is required for a match to be a rivalry match. A boring matchup is never a good rivalry.

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90s games > 00s games

Crono vs. Solid Snake isn't a contest rivalry just like CT vs. Melee isn't a rivalry.

Crono vs. Snake isn't a rivalry, but it could be if they had met sometime more recent than 2002. CT vs. Melee may as well be a rivalry to me. It's Nintendo vs. Square, the best night vote game against the best day vote game, and the best old game vs. the best (very) new game, all in one.

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90s games > 00s games