The Ides of March Madness

For the... severalth time across what must now be three or four different message boards (I swear the Fire Pro community must be part nomad) I am using a Fire Pro game to simulate my March Madness bracket because why not/to prove it is strongest/because it has to work eventually. The goal as always is to enter this into a group competition and beat at least a few people who actually know something about college basketball and who picked brackets to the best of their ability. One year it picked the eventual winner of the tourney and hence finished in the middle of the pack, most years it finishes dead last. Let's see how it goes this year!



For those wondering about the hows of this experiment (the whys will never be adequately explained) I take a ranking of the relative strengths of the teams that made the tourney, via math make the number range roughly the same as the edit point range you'll see for edits in a Fire Pro game, and pick edits with roughly the same point value as each team. Edit points are not the best way to determine the relative strength of edits I know, but there's no other easy way to do this.



Now this is the second year using Fire Pro World to simulate this and... okay I'll be frank with you, I haven't really played the game since last summer, I kinda fell out of the mood and spent my free time on other things. What this means is that this is the first time I've spent any time with the game since all the DLC came out and while I'm sure you've had these discussions before and am sick of them my god is dealing with edits a frickin' mess now if you don't have said DLC. Eventually I settled on having to check every possible workshop edit for the date of its last alteration and ignoring all that were after late September of last year, it took more than twice as long as it did last year and was very user-unfriendly.  Poor job.

Anyways~ The tourney itself was swell enough and almost produced a reasonable result, some random highlights:

-Spot of the tourney was in the Giant Baba/DDP match. Baba was in control and hit his trademark 16 Ton Big Boot for the possible win, but was too gassed to follow up. He eventually caught his breath, took a step towards DDP to go for the pin but as he got there DDP got up and hit an immediate Diamond Cutter for a razor close 2.9 count! The match itself had a remarkably well paced sense of escalation and was finished off an avalanche cutter from the corner shortly after, which was the next/last big move following.

-Barrington Hughes and pentagon had a 98% rated match the featured Barrington taking the tree of woe double stomp and hitting a high cross body off the top for a near fall. For those of you sadly unaware, this is Barrington Hughes:




He is a beautiful man and he had a beautiful match.

-Worker of the tourney was somehow Switchblade Jay White who in three matches had two be rated 100%. The first of the two was the more expected one in a victory against Naito, who would have won if he wasn't so tranquilo and decided to taunt after hitting his finish as opposed to going for the pin; he naturally walked right into a Bladerunner afterwards. The other was a more surprising match against Mark Henry that somehow went an in-game 33 minutes (maybe one or two other tourney matches hit 20). Jay was controlling the match but I'm pretty sure every Bladerunner but one was countered, and the one that hit was near a corner and resulted in a rope break.

-Nathan Jones somehow delivered the highest rated opening round match in the first half of the tourney, reaching 90% against Shuji Ishikawa. Ignoring that percentage it was one of the best matches in the tourney to watch, Ishikawa literally throwing everything he had at Jones (and if you haven't seen Ishikawa wrestle, he both has a ton to throw and is the tallest active pro wrestler in japan barring any small indies I am unfamiliar with) as Jones kept getting up like some horror movie monster. Eventually Jones got his hands on him, hit a massive chokeslam and got the 3 count. He was rewarded with a match next round against the regional #1 seed...

-Ric Flair, who blessed me with some wonderfully appropriate game logic "happy accidents". Literally the first move against Nathan Jones was a low percentage, high damage brass knux shot which Jones immediately no sold, followed up by a no sold Flair chop and Flair then begging off. Brought a tear to my eye. Flair in this match basically hit every cheap tactic the edit was given, including going back to the brass knux much later after being tossed to the outside and catching Jones when he followed him out. The match ended shortly later with I believe a low blow followed by a roll up (in my mind I know he was holding the tights). Flair moved on to face...

-Mick Foley, against whom Flair hit the exact same move three to four times in a row: a kick straight to the knee. This match Flair hit only a couple cheapshots and instead just went after the leg non-stop, but he happened to walk into the ring with a psychotic brawler version of Foley who responded by punching Flair bloody and keeping at the wound non-stop. After that it was a race to see whether Flair would run out of blood before Foley's knee gave out. Foley just will not tap, and he won the war.

-It was nearly a final battle between a #1 seed and a #2 seed, but Brock got upset and instead the Blade Runners exploded (lot of blade runner references today) as cinderella Sting faced off against an overpowered Ultimate Warrior! The 25+ year old dream match finally occurred and amazingly, despite all odds was actually a really good match, believe it scored a 91%. Warrior was in control early on and close to putting Sting away quick but gassed out (I know, what are the odds?) giving Sting a chance to fight back. Haymakers were thrown, 2.9 counts were had and eventually Sting got the victory with the scorpion deathlock.

So yeah, according the Fire Pro Auburn is gonna win the national championship, place your bets while you still have the chance!