The Video Game Draft Version 4.0: IT CAN STOP TIME! (Goooooooo Matches) - Winner: BaSSiL

That wasn't half-assed at all!

 

No, I suppose it's not near as half-assed as it could have been.

 

Sorry, guys. I'll be home tomorrow, but until then I really don't have enough time to research for this draft and the movie draft. But I'll have plenty of time this weekend and beyond.

 

The judges must be waiting on one more "JUDGMENTS???" comment from JK before they post.

 

Well, I am inclined to vote for Tupac. The prep time benefits them a bit more, with all the summons and the materia, and the cohesion is very, very nice. I don't know if Cloud would win against KOS-MOS, but he has a good chance. That's not really the biggest part of the fight though. It's very tough, because I think the Therapy buddies are slightly more powerful alone, but when Tupac is put together they just shine a bit more.

So, Tupac.

 

Seriously. Well, we can't wait on JK forever, I guess.

You know, I looked at these two teams again today, and it turns out that I don't think it's half as tough now as it was when I originally compared.

There's some things I feel very compelled to point out from cap's first argument.

Cloud Strife=KOS-MOS (I suppose that unprepped, Cloud's probably going to lose six times out of ten, but materia'd up from Yuffie's stash evens it up, if not giving Cloud the edge. Ridiculous match, though.)

Actually, unprepped, Cloud loses more like 9/10. And honestly, it could very well be 10/10, but he's good enough to where I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on pulling out a lucky win once out of every 10 matches. You are right about the prep, though. It's a much, much closer match when he's prepped, but I question that he gets an edge on her. Very much so. At least nothing noticiable.

Dagger > Shion Uzuki (Her eidolons are better overall than Shion's EK)
Ratchet < Eiko Carol (but it's very close. With the arsenal Ratchet can bring, he can come damn close to taking her out, if not pull an upset)

Okay, sorry, but no. You can't just brush off Shion against Dagger and then turn around and try to say that Ratchet vs. Eiko is very close and that he can possibly pull off an upset. I mean... dude, c'mon. I see right through this amateur-night stuff.

Strago > Tir McDohl (I say this because Strago brings so much to the team. He's probably as powerful or moreso than Tir magically, and his support will be invaluable)

Uh, no. Tir is not only significantly more powerful, he out-skills Strago by... a bunch. And Tir can equip more runes to help support his team and close the gap of magical variety between Strago and him some.

Delta Squad > Roxas (Roxas is fast enough to take one, maybe two. But not the entire Ratcheted Up Delta Squad)

Yes he is.

Celes > Shadow (The Runic Blade being big in the overall match, Celes can hold off Shadow long enough on the melee front to take him out with magic)

Closer than you're trying to imply. She's more powerful magically, but Shadow is no slouch himself. Plus he's a good deal faster and probably a bit more skilled. I'd agree with the end result, though.

Yuffie Kisaragi > Jubei Yagyu (With her materia, she can do it all. Fight. Support. Offensive Magic. And Summons. She doesn't lose here)

Ummm, yeah, she probably does, actually. She took a match against Samus, but had Samus also been prepped...

And Jubei is prepped for her here. He can outfight her any day of the week, he's got some nice magic of his own and if goes into Onimusha mode, there's no question he can hold his own in direct combat with a Yuffie-level summon. Easily. All summoners are not created equal. None of these FFVII characters that can all summon simply by equipping some materia can, IMO, hold much of a candle to a more practiced and dedicated summoner like Dagger or Yuna.

Simon Belmont = Vivi Ornitier (Vivi's got the magic, Simon's got the melee skill and the stopwatch. This one's pretty even)

Equal? No way. Vivi's far too powerful. End of story.

Knuckes =< Dawn of Dreams (Knuckles is fast and strong, but the numbers of Dawn will be tough for him)

Near equal? No way. It's not that close. All three members of DoD are extremely quick themselves. They have numbers on him, they have a ranged fighter, and they're extremely cohesive (not to mention a lot smarter than him). They'll wear him down to a nub within... well, not moments, but... yeah, they clearly win.

Jowy Andreides < Serge (Serge is a better fighter, Jowy is better for support)

You're definitely right about Serge being a better fighter, but in what way is Jowy better for support? He can equip other runes, so he's not bad, certainly. But, uh, Serge has a long list of magic to draw from. Offensive, healing, the usual suspects. He's not only a better fighter, but also probably better for support.

Anyways, yeah, I think Tupac is a bit more

 

I should not be doing this.

 

This is what I've been waiting on. Some good head to head teams breakdowns. Now the characters that I haven't really been able to find much info on, I can kind of gain a sense of their worth here. This is good, makes me happy. Thanks for the judgements all. Now we just wait for a third.

 

[image=http://i30.tinypic.com/29b2b12.jpg]

 

I hate doing those individual breakdowns during team battles. I think I've mentioned that in other team battles, but that seems to be the norm here.

Anyway, it's not like that, if the two teams fought, they would pair off down the line like that and just fight a bunch of one-on-one fights. It would be far more chaotic than that, and it's pretty logical to assume that characters that know each other or have a connection would fight together. Cloud with Yuffie, Sora with Riku (and possibly Cloud and Yuffie since he recognizes them), Celes and Strago, The Belmonts, etc. So instead of fighting one-on-one battles, the Therapy Buddies would be fighting my guys on a more team-oriented basis. That's where my guys beat his. I think I can safely say that my guys, who do prep better overall, by the way, would definitely fight as a more cohesive unit. When you have that kind of advantage, it would take a rout in power on the other side to offset that. I just don't see where they rout my team there.

 

Uhhh, folks, I think we've got a problem.

 

Crap, I swore I'd posted earlier. Sorry!

Kopelle's got a leg up in terms of individual skill and power, while Tupac has the edge in cohesion.

I normally push cohesion. Here...it's not enough. Sure, Tupac can break by pairs...but their positive cohesion doesn't give them a giant leg up: Kopelle'll be working fine together, and they'll have had all their prep time to work out a plan too. If Kopelle had some cohesion issues, that'd be enough to reverse this for me...but they don't.

My one main reservation in giving it to Kopelle is KOS-MOS getting distracted by Shion. That's not quite enough, though. So...

Kopelle.

 

So, new round/matches/what?

 

Yeah, I know. I've actually just been doing a bit of pondering these past couple of days. And, uh, I'm making the judgment call here and just skipping us ahead to the playoffs. Interest and participation in this seems to be barely hanging on by a thread, and I'm thinking we should just get this over with as quickly as possible.

And, well, it won't be my call, since I'm not even gonna be participating in the next one (if there is such a thing), but... maybe this thing should just be put to sleep for a while. Because (and this is not meant to be an arrogant statement) it sure seems sometimes like I'm the only one who really knows enough about the majority of the characters on the list. It really seems like I'm the only one who's played... well, take your pick of well over a dozen games that have a hefty chunk of characters representing them on the list. I honestly shudder to think about what would happen in here if I wasn't judging.

And I think a total shame, because, IMO, this draft has just as much potential as any of the other drafts that are thriving right now.

Oh, and I guess if you all cry foul about skipping ahead to the playoffs, then I can reconsider. But why do I get the feeling that's not going to happen?

Matches up soon.

 

Final standings for the shortened regular season. Top three of each conference head to the playoffs, with the top seeds getting the first round bye. And as always, head-to-head matchup results are the first tiebreaker with individual match records being secondary.


Atari 2600 Conference

Manson's Real Reality ~ 3-0 (17-13)
Richard Kopelle and His Therapy Buddys ~ 2-1 (15-15)
Tupac's Team in '94 ~ 2-1 (16-14)
Kings of the Underworld ~ 1-2 (17-13)
The B-Team ~ 1-2 (14-16)
The Non-De-Scripts ~ 0-3 (11-19)

So our top three here are Zizz, BaSSiL and cap-fan. Zizz gets the first round bye, while BaSSiL grabs the second seed thanks to his recent win over cap-fan.

ColecoVision Conference

Dante! and Friends ~ 3-0 (22-8)
The Fall of Man ~ 3-0 (18-12)
The Only Way To Go ~ 2-1 (20-10)
Wokka Wokka Wokka ~ 1-2 (18-12)
Rex Inferior ~ 0-3 (11-19)
It's The Thought That Counts ~ 0-3 (1-29)

Well, we have two undefeated teams up at the top, and obviously they haven't faced off yet, so the individual record becomes the tiebreaker, and the bye goes to Hamm. I know, it's perhaps a tad unfair, seeing as how Hamm's record got a huge boost when he faced PRENN's all-star squads and Inty didn't get a chance to get the same boost, but that's just kinda the way it goes. Please leave all complaints with my secretary.


First round of the playoffs... and it just so happens that it's two of the same exact matchups we had this last round.


Atari 2600 Conference


Tupac's Team in '94 vs. Richard Kopelle and His Therapy Buddys


ColecoVision Conference


The Only Way To Go vs. The Fall of Man


Let's get those numbers in.

 

I don't want a freaking bye. Put me up against Prenn.

 

No, you get a bye. I know it's painful, but you'll live.


Atari 2600 Conference


Tupac's Team in '94 (0) vs. Richard Kopelle and His Therapy Buddys (0)


ColecoVision Conference


The Only Way To Go (0) vs. The Fall of Man (0)


Yeah, sure, we'll start the playoffs with 2. Why not?


Atari 2600 Conference


Yuffie Kisaragi (FF VII) *prepared* vs. Samus Aran (Metroid)


ColecoVision Conference


Xigbar (Kingdom Hearts) vs. Thrall (Warcraft) *prepared*

Jebus... there had to be a tough one in there. Well, both Chim and Inty are pretty busy, so I kinda doubt any debate is on the way. I'll think about it for a few hours and judge later today.

 

Rada, Rada rada ra-da.

 

One option would be to just revise the roster. When I joined this draft, I figured I was enough of a gamer that the list would be pretty familiar. But when the list came up, I only knew about a fraction of the characters listed. And a little examination reveals that the list is completely dominated by Japanese characters - mainly from JRPGs, action games, and fighting games. I mean, the first Western character to be picked (discounting Prenn's picks) was Kain at the bottom of the third. And I don't know if there's an easy fix for the problem; Japanese characters are just way more powerful than the characters in Western games. I mean, there's just no Western character (unless we were to count Sovereign from Mass Effect, which is sketchy territory) I can think of that could ever hope to compete with KOS-MOS or Dante or Sephiroth. But we could stand to trim some of the more obscure Japanese picks. Some of these series (Final Fantasy, Suikoden, Fire Emblem) are just loaded with clutter. I mean, the Fire Emblem series just doesn't warrant any more than a handful of picks.

I don't mean to hate on JRPGs - I actually enjoy them, but I can only play so much. A lot of these titles are obscure, and nearly all of them are very lengthy. So I'm suggesting we trim them, cut the list drastically (now that there are only twelve teams, we can stand to cut out some characters). Then we maybe try to add in some characters from Western games to even out the roster.

 

Could you give some examples of these "Western" characters you'd want to add? And you label them as clutter, but the simple fact is that there's probably only a teeny tiny handful of characters from the FF series that aren't really worth drafting at any point (unless we were to expand the teams even furher). And the FF games have been hugely popular all over the world for a long, long time. Yeah, we have one or two people here that (*ahem*) "don't get" the whole FF thig, but that's really the minority.

I mean, like, what are you talking about here? Ditching JRPG charcaters in favor of... what? Western FPS "characters"? Jeez, I hope not. That'll be real fun. That Doom Guy vs. That Quake Guy and other magnificent matchups.

If the criteria becomes which games most people are likley to have played, that's not gonna solve very many problems, and it's just going to raise new ones on top of it.

And in case anyone was thinking it, moving the draft back to the games forum where all the "gamers" are probably isn't going to work. With the first three drafts, we had maybe three or four games forum regulars sign up. And what ends up happening there? **** like Princess Zelda and Kilik from Soul Caliber going in the first round.

East vs. West is meaningless. Draft-worthy characters are draft-worthy characters. Maybe I'll grant you Suikoden as being too "obscure" for anyone else besides me, but ***damnit, I think it's one of gaming's biggest injustices that so few people (provided you're a fan of RPGs in the slightest) have actually played that series.

 

I can't wait to draft Adam the crazy clown from Dead Rising.

Seriously, though, I'm getting kind of tired of this same kind of argument over in animated. Oh, and especially in the Average Joe draft. Though that argument did differ slightly. It was still a bunch of people baaawwwwing over what they deemed to be obscure characters.

 

(unless we were to expand the teams even further)

That is the exact opposite of what needs to happen. It just seems like people start to lose interest more so when the matches start taking too long than during the actual drafting. What was wrong with ten man teams?

I know a ton of talent gets left on the board, but that usually happens anyway until a draft is into it's seventh or eight version.

And I'm sorry that I haven't played some of these games, and am not familiar with a lot of characters and their specifics. At the time we needed a third judge, and everyone that was interested was already signed up to GM, so I doubt we would have found another. It's a lot more difficult to really do research for this draft than any other. Nothing compares to actually having played the game, and it's not easy to do that given a lot of their lengths, especially for the games that came out for older systems.

I don't think it has anything to do with the character list. I think you can make a competent team out of games you have played, and now by going back and looking at what previously successful teams have done as well. I'd rather have excess picks that could be useful than a list of leftovers that weren't drafted simply because they were absolutely useless.

I mean, you could say the same thing about Animated, that a lot of the more powerful characters are Eastern, but it seems to be more popular than this one. I think it has more to do with accessibility of information and the fact that you really only need 10-15 minutes of video to get a really good grasp on a character's abilities in there. This draft just takes a little bit more of a commitment than the others. And I think it shows that most people really only want to draft a team rather than babysit a bunch of characters they've never heard of(even though it's not that hard to send in numbers every once in a while) for an entire game. They just don't have the attention span for it.

 

Dude, I agree with absolutely every single word of that. Teams probably should be shrunk down some in size. And I didn't mean to make it seem like I was blaming you for anything. That wasn't my intention.

And I totally agree about how this draft requires a huge time commitment to get all the relevant info for a majority of the characters. And it's not you guys who are being "lazy" about things. It's me. I'm a total anomaly. As far back as I can recall, I've only ever needed to sleep roughly four hours a night. So that leaves me with around three or four more hours in my day that almost everyone else doesn't get. And since these extra hours are in the dead of the night, when there's not really a whole helluva lot to do, what do you think I end up doing with them? I play games and watch movies and TV shows (and read and whatever else). And over the course of the 14 or so years I've been gaming, those extra hours add up. To a lot. I've played through most of these 70-80 hours epics multiple times. Like FF VII. It's not even my favorite FF, but I've gone through it five times. Crap like that.

So it's totally me, but it's still an issue. Just in this draft alone there have been multiple instances in which I've had to "correct" certain arguments like I was some teacher grading homework papers and circling mistakes with my red marker. I'm not talking about things that can be chalked up to opinion. I'm talking about basic factual errors. Like one that comes to mind was when someone said that Emerelda would not only bring a lot of tech to a team battle, but also strategic thinking.

I mean... where the hell did that come from? What tech does she bring aside from the fact the she herself is a piece of equipment? And strategy? NOWHERE in the game or anywhere else did she display even the tiniest hint of strategic thinking. Stuff like that. People are seriously making **** up because they don't know, and... I dunno, hoping that I don't notice and call them on it?

Honestly, what are you guys gonna do without me here? It's nobody's fault, but it's still something of a problem. I dunno, whatever. Maybe you'll all still have fun with this after this one, but...

 

And I didn't mean to make it seem like I was blaming you for anything. That wasn't my intention.


That wasn't what I was suggesting. I'm just saying sometimes I don't know who to vote for, and that has sometimes caused delays, and that's the last thing any draft needs.


I am more agreeing with you on the point of what is this draft going to do without someone as knowledgeable as you? I certainly have no intention of judging it again, as I have found that I am not that informed, at least enough to be a judge, especially when there are other drafts I'd rather spend my time on. And I'm not saying there aren't others that know some things, but where are they?


I guess it doesn't matter to me, since I probably won't be in it(or if I am it will be for a theme team or something), so if the list changes, and all of those people are gotten rid of from it, I don't even care. But it's a shame if useful characters are disposed of because no one knows who they are. I guess this list isn't for people who just want to draft. I know I wouldn't like to see someone like Majestic or Blue Beetle removed from the CBD or something like that just because no one has ever read any of their comics.

 

Atari 2600 Conference


Yuffie Kisaragi (FF VII) *prepared* vs. Samus Aran (Metroid)

Yep.

Winner: Yuffie


ColecoVision Conference


Xigbar (Kingdom Hearts) vs. Thrall (Warcraft) *prepared*

Okay, I'm gonna go with Thrall, but only by the skin of his teeth (that really is a stupid expression). Main reason it's so close is because Thrall's most poweful attack, earthquake, is going to be next to useless. But, with some healing items, the lightning, the shadow wolf summons, and his strength and skill, I think he can wear down Xigbar and eek out a win. Could easily go the other way, though.

Winner: Thrall