It has finally come to this. The ultimate showdown. Mark versus Alex.
Who will prevail?
(It’s also your last chance to win cash-money to upgrade your home entertainment. There’s also that.)
Kotaku’s Iron Controller series is brought to you by Netflix and Marvel’s Iron Fist. Danny Rand is an orphan, Monk, billionaire and living weapon. After a 15 year absence he returns to NYC to reclaim his family legacy. Marvel’s Iron Fist premieres March 17th only on Netflix.
When we last left The Iron Controller, Mark had arrived back at the Kotaku office, to find that Alex had gone rogue. You can catch up on previous chapters of the Iron Controller here.
Now it’s time to settle the score.
Now for…
The Competition
Now for the cold hard cash. Thanks to Netflix and Iron Fist, you can win $1000 to fix up your home entertainment set-up.
Entering is simple, we just want you to answer the following question in less than 500 words…
Tell us about the most intense 1v1 match you’ve had in all your years playing video games?
Terms and conditions can be found here.
Thanks for reading The Iron Controller. We had a lot of fun making it. Special thanks go to John Kane for putting it altogether. If you enjoyed Iron Fist, consider checking out John’s new iOS game Mallow Drops which launches today! Congrats John!
Want to revisit previous chapters? Here you go!
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/04/chapter-4-of-the-iron-controller-and-win-1000/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/04/ironc_4d-410×231.jpg” title=”Chapter 4 Of The Iron Controller (And Win $1000!)” excerpt=”When we last left The Iron Controller things were getting complicated. Mark was deep in training, while Alex was scheming, bending Kotaku Australia to his own, insane will.
Today, in chapter 4, Mark will finally unlock the true secrets of The Iron Controller. And prepare for the ULTIMATE BATTLE.”]
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/win-1000-with-chapter-3-of-the-iron-controller/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/03/ironc_1c-410×231.jpg” title=”Win $1000 With Chapter 3 Of… The Iron Controller” excerpt=”Living in a weird cave in tibet with a team of pro gamers. Check.
Found The Iron Controller. Check.
Now what do we do with the damn thing?
Now the training begins…
Welcome to Chapter 3 of… The Iron Controller.”]
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/win-1000-with-the-iron-controller-chapter-2/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/03/ironc_2c-410×231.jpg” title=”Win $1000 With The Iron Controller: Chapter 2″ excerpt=”Last week The Iron Controller finished with high drama — a prophetic dream… a plane crash?
Now stranded in the mountains of Tibet, ravaged by a fierce Blizzard, how will our hero (me) survive?
All these questions are answered and more in The Iron Controller. Chapter 2.”]
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/03/the-iron-controller-begins-right-here-right-now/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/03/17200432_10155115077782767_763509798_o-410×231.jpg” title=”The Iron Controller Begins Right Here, Right Now” excerpt=”Iron Fist is out this week — March 17 to be precise — and we’ve partnered up with Netflix to bring your our very own interactive story… The Iron Controller. A story about video games, intrigue and a coup d’etat of Kotaku Australia itself!
We’re also giving away $5000 over the next month. There’s that as well.”]
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13 responses to “Win $1000 In The Final Chapter Of… The Iron Controller”
It was a freezing August, an eternity ago now. I’d taken shelter from the weather amongst the glow of screens at Timezone. The place was deserted, so a rally game (I can’t recall which one now) was keeping me company. It was one of those rectangular layouts where each booth was around a central pillar, facing outwards. I could see the booths to either side of me but not the one opposite.
As I was basking in the warmth of the cabinet, I noticed someone else had joined the race I just started. Both the booths I could see were empty so this challenger must have been on the opposite side. I was confident though, racing games were practically all I played at arcades back then and I was a master.
From the start, I realised this was no ordinary opponent. They kept pace with me every turn and corner, every straight their car was right there alongside mine. Nothing I tried to do to shake them worked. I even tried playing dirty by ramming or PITing them but they always managed to slip away. And then the worst of it, they managed to get ahead of me and stay there. I took every corner perfectly, I made no mistakes, yet somehow they were still ahead. I desperately wanted to get up and go see who this racing genius was, convinced I was somehow driving against Colin McRae himself, but I was too consumed with recovering my lead to try to see around the pillar.
It was halfway through the final lap when I finally caught a break. My adversary, only a car-length in front, clipped the barriers and lost speed. I managed to get my nose a few inches in front of them as we turned the last corner and crossed the finish line. My heart was racing as I waited for the scores to come up, then cheered out loud when I saw I’d won. The times showed only a tenth of a second difference.
While I sat there in exaltation, I heard a noise from the other side of the pillar, followed by a middle-aged woman with bags of shopping dragging an eight year old girl who clearly didn’t want to leave. “We have to go now or dinner won’t be ready for your father when he gets home” the mother reasoned, while the girl was pulling back against her and pleading “But mum you made me lose!” And then they were gone.
I sat there in silence for a minute, not quite sure what to make of what I just saw but with a sinking suspicion it was somehow related to my win. I eventually gathered the courage to get up and look around at the other side of the pillar. The far booth was empty. The whole arcade was empty.
I left in a mute daze. I’ve never told anyone this story until now.
…this whole time I never realised that there were words you could click on in the thingo to advance it to another “page”. I just thought something was broken and not displaying properly.
So many intense 1v1’s over the years…which one stands out as the most intense?
I’ve had plenty of intense ladder matches of games like Starcraft and Dawn of War, and plenty of intense matches of competitive Smash Bros.
I’ll try to bend the rules a bit and list 3 things:
1. One of my Dawn of War matches was an epic that lasted more than an hour, and it wasn’t a “20 minute no rush” kind of game – it was constant back and forth the entire time. After a gruelling effort I came out on top, but for most of the match the result could have gone either way.
2. There was also a Starcraft II match where both of us managed to more or less wipe each other out…we were both only just holding on to the match. I started to long distance mine with my drones in an area of the map he hadn’t checked, managed to gather enough resources to build a new HQ at the expansion…and then he found me. I didn’t really have any other option but to group select everything I had and hit attack on his base. Somehow, I managed to wipe him out before he wiped me out.
3. And lastly Smash…this was at a major tournament last year, playing against a power ranked player from outer state. I’m not ranked at all in my state, so I wasn’t favoured to win this at all, but I took game 1 of the best of 3 set. He came back and took game 2, levelling the set at 1-1. In an intense game 3 he managed to clutch out the win over me…so I did lose the match, but I was so very close to actually taking him out and causing a major upset. On another occasion in a different tournament, I did manage to beat a power ranked player from another region – once again a game 3 situation, last stock, last hit. He went for an all or nothing read that would have won the game if it worked but his attack whiffed, which gave me enough time to punish it and knock him out. That was the first time I’d beaten a PR player in a tourney set.
Playtime or whatever its called at Highpoint Shopping Centre in Maribynong. I saw this guy thrashing people at SFIV and thought “piece of cake”. So i beat him, and by this point we had a crowd forming around us. I beat the next 5 challengers without breaking a sweat, then all of a sudden an Asian guy comes and sits next to me.
Thrashes me in round one with a perfect. Round 2, I’m getting worked up for the oncoming onslaught when i notice he pulls out his phone and starts checking his facebook…. i had gotten a punch in at the start then didnt know what to do, so i won round 2. next round starts, same thing. So i start unleashing on him… his health reaches about 60%, he puts the phone down, obliterates me to the point where i have a slither of health, grabs his phone, and just casually walks away without even finishing me off…
the arcade equivalent of dropping the mic… worst part was that my brother and mates were all there, and keep bringing this up every couple of months…. /o\
So I have not seen any winning announcements for the previous comps. As far as I can tell from the terms several should have been judged by now? Did I somehow miss every single one?
I think each week’s have been judged, but all the winners will be announced at the end.
At a house party with a bunch of people I didn’t know, there was a TV with a PS2, and some guy wailing his hardest on a little plastic instrument with Guitar Hero 2. There was a group of people sitting in the room watching him in awe. Carry On My Wayward Son, classic.
“He’s the best at this, you should see him!” his friends were saying. “You play Guitar Hero don’t you?” one of my friends calls out. I try to stay modest, as I didn’t see much point in bragging about a game of hitting colours with a toy guitar. “Well let’s go head to head!” the guy says. “You pick the song”, he offers “but only on Expert”. So, Laid To Rest by Lamb Of God was my jam.
“I’ve got $10 on Dan! “$20! $30!” Wait, we’re playing for money now?! Everyone starts lumping cash into a pile. Suddenly there’s $200 sitting there, and I’m feeling some pressure. What if I lose? The song’s about to start. “Easy money!” he yells to his mates, laughing. Ok…let’s take him down.
The cash riding on the song didn’t matter after the first 2 bars, I was in the zone, my element, and Cocky-McCockFace couldn’t keep up. His song became more “chink” sounds than song, you could see the frustration on his face. While it wasn’t my mission, I managed to embarrass him in front of all of his friends. I won’t lie, it felt good.
Then, the complaints. “Nope. Bullshit! You only picked the song you were best at! Double or nothing. My pick this time!”. OK, best 2 out of 3? I couldn’t argue with that. At this stage, the amount of cash piling up was starting to get a bit stupid. Even with the confidence from my previous win, looking at that money made me shit the beginnings of a brick.
“There, good luck with this one!” He laughs, locking in his song choice.
The Beast and the Harlot – Avenged Sevenfold. I look at my friends. I try not to smile.
It was brutal. Savage. Our score stayed close for about 20 seconds, then I nailed the first Star Power, then the next, and before I knew it I was ahead of him by 100k points. I was owning it.
Then, the most glorious thing happened. He quit. Didn’t finish the song, didn’t even say a word. Just stepped back, dropped the guitar, and walked out. Of course, the entire room lost it’s shit. Some were rolling on the floor in hysterics, even the people who had just lost money were flipping out. I never thought I’d one day win the respect of a room full of people from Guitar Hero. Absolute madness. It was high-fives all around as I collected the money and divvy’d up the winnings with my friends. I never would have told them to put money on me for something like that, but I’m definitely glad they did.
I used to play a lot of Super Smash Bros. Melee, maybe too much. Regardless, I was really good back then, perhaps not as good as a professional eSports player, but for the inactive and somewhat lazy university student that I was? I was really good. A close friend of mine, was also really good.
One day, we were at said friend’s house, a bunch of us, but it was he and I who were playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. I was using my best character (at the time) being Link, while my friend utilized Fire Emblem’s Marth.
The TV we were playing one was crazy small. It’s width probably wasn’t even a foot in length, one of those real old school black TVs, that essentially looked like a security monitor. My friend and I huddled close toward the TV, while our friends were standing behind us, cheering us both on.
The match was vicious, it was a stock game with no lives. When one of us scored a life, the other would quickly take a life in return, it was an extreme back and forth match, like a game of Tennis, just without the time.
Eventually, we were both down to one stock life each, both of us were at a dangerously high percentage, when suddenly… the power went out.
We like to think that our battle was so fiercely epic, that we knocked out the power grid of half of our city.
It feels like there’s been surprisingly few 1v1s throughout my gaming life, but there is one that jumps immediately to mind – when I went up in a fight against possibly the nicest man in gaming.
Me vs Charles Martinet.
(dunno if that counts as 3000 words >.>)
My friends stopped wanting to play Smash Bros 64 with me, so when a new kid came to school and said he was pretty good at it, I had no choice but to challenge him.
We both picked Fox(naturally) on Hyrule Castle stage. It was five minutes of rolling around and near misses before either of us could land a hit. I don’t remember who won, I don’t even remember if we finished the match, but at the time I just felt so alive so I didn’t care. I was having too much fun.
My cousin and I never really got to LAN, as I was in Brisbane and he in Victoria. Chatting away over the phone and talking it up for months and months. He was finally able to visit and I had 2 PC’s.
We were to play Command and Conquer, and we set ourselves up in separate rooms so no screen cheating could occur. The game was set, and after so much smack talk it was time to let our gaming do the talking.
The game started, and I engineer rushed him and sold everything in a couple of minutes.
But watching those engineers slowly run to the buildings, while getting chased was pretty intense!
The stage is set.
Halo multiplayer online – 4 v 4 at the time. Standard slayer.
We are dominating. There is only one guy on their team good enough to challenge us.
Teabagging ensues after every death on all of their team because we are graceful champions. The end score was 50 – 23. I was worst on the team in kills but not in skill.
A message comes through after the match over xbox live to me
‘u guys r s*** u suck so bad and think u r better then us so u teabag. u r s*** c****. 1 v 1 me’
(yes, I censored the star words but you can all assume the are ‘sexy’ and ‘chiefs’)
A party invite comes in, so I accept it.
‘I f***** your mum last night and now I’m going to f*** you. accept my invite for 1 v 1’
So I do. I aint letting some random on the internet be derogative to me? who do you take me for?
He sets up a custom game and starts it off but just as it countdowns my stomach begins to reject the burritos I had for dinner. It churns. It growls. Now I am fighting an epic battle of 1 v 1 with my stomach and this child on the internet in a game of slayer. Custom rules first to 25.
I have him pegged and take an early lead 11-3 with some sneaky motion tracking hiding by crouch walking and my power weapons. But the stomach roars again. It bellows in pain. I can feel it coming. A poop for the ages but I can’t lose this 1 v 1. Not here. Not up 8 kills. My concentration fades. He begins to notch down my lead. 20 – 19. I can’t take it anymore. This guy has been trash talking me every second on the mic and all I can do is let out groans of displeasure as I’m trying to hold it together.
23 – 22.
He picks me.
23 – 23.
It has gone on too long. My body is sweaty. Its ready to expel. A small little passenger is ready to leave and rears its ugly head into my dacks. I can feel it slipping out. PLEASE. HOLD ON. I LOOK UP AND PRAY.
23-24.
NO. HE CANT BEAT ME. NOT AFTER ALL THE THINGS HE HAS BEEN SAYING.
But I can’t hold it in anymore. The passenger is more than just head now. Its starting to come out. I can feel the warmth embrace of a soiled evening. Im not going to be disappointed on two fronts.
24-24.
I can’t hold it in any longer.
25-24. I WIN.
I WIN.
Teabags ensure.
Most intense game ever
But the excitement…The excitement opens the floodgate and I start pooping everywhere…
I feel it all down my legs. All through my dacks. But I take solace in my victory
He leaves the party immediately and I’m sure he will forever remember me and that game
So if you are reading this: I BEAT THE S*** OUT OF YOU LITTLE KID AND IT TOOK THE S*** OUT OF ME.
I’m an average fighting gamer (at best!) and I lose all the time, but one friend Gio could just never beat me. I don’t know why, he practised all the time, and could easily beat our other friends. For some reason I just got in his head.
One time in Fight Night he was Muhammad Ali and was beating on my random feather weight. I went down. He celebrated. “Don’t get cocky Gio, you haven’t won yet”.
I got back up. I knocked him down, 1… 2… 3 times! I won and he refused to play Fight Night ever again.
Another time we were playing Soul Caliber. He was Kilik and had taken my Nightmare down to a slither of life without taking so much as a dent. He could barely sit still he was so excited. I was out of options, so I tried an old trick. “Acting cocky again are we Gio?” About a second later I kicked him out the ring.
But our absolute, most epic, knockdown, battle royale, ultimate showdown happened in X-men Next Dimension. He was a great Sabretooth player. Sabretooth had a healing ability that allowed him to heal small amounts of health regularly throughout the match. I’d seen him beat other friends easily with liberal use of this ability. I decided to fight fire with fire. Wolverine can also heal, but it requires way more energy to pull it off. To balance that, he heals a huge portion of health back.
The fight was going his way. He was in control. But he couldn’t finish me. Everytime he’d beat me to within an inch of defeat I’d pull enough energy to recharge. We had the timer set to infinite, so he had to ko me. I would gradually chip away his health, and he couldn’t quite heal quickly enough to bring it back. He was low, but I was down to zero. I only needed a little more energy to heal again so he knew he needed to finish me now. “Don’t get cocky Gio!”
He ran at me claws flailing. He only needed to hit me once. I didn’t have enough energy to heal but he’d forgotten one thing. We’d been so focused on healing all match we’d totally neglected our other special moves, and while I may not have been able to heal, I had enough energy to pull off a hugely damaging move. Wolverine struck out like a hurricane. Sabretooth, was defeated.
That was the last time I played X-men Dimensions. I think we both knew no match would ever beat that.
The shuriken whirled past me with the flutter of a sparrow in flight, biting across my shoulder as it passed. It would have drawn blood, if I had any; one of the many advantages of un-death. As I vanished behind a thicket there would be no steaming blood rising from the snow to mark my trail. I would draw no breath for my hunter to track. My rotting stench, however, may betray me as it finds its way to the keen elvish nose of my adversary.
From sunrise to sunset our forces had clashed with the hated Alliance, both sides irrepressible in the struggle to gain control of the Alterac Valley. And for nearly as long I had been dancing with the prowling Night Elf who now stalked me, even as I in turn hunted her. Three times I had come within a hairs breadth of ending her life, and three times she vanished like a snowflake in the wind. I had never faced an opponent with such resilience. If my heart still worked it would be leaping in my chest with excitement.
Minutes passed, my unnatural sight searching through the falling snow for a sign of her. A soft crunch in the frost – a rabbit. The slight sway of a branch – the wind. A faint plume of breath rising – there.
I stepped through the very shadows themselves and appeared behind the rogue, my daggers lunging toward the space between her shoulders, but she turned with impossible grace and twisted around my blades. She struck my knee with a kick and I faltered, her own knives raced toward me. I flung a handful of frost into her face before leaping to the side and charging in once more.
Back and forth we danced, like summer dragonflies. Time and time again our blades left longing as we attempted to deliver the sweet kiss of death upon one another. Many times the horns and trumpets blasted, rallying cries and blustering charges. But we had no interest.
In this moment we were neither Horde nor Alliance, Forsaken or Elf – we were agents of death.
As the dance drew on I knew that speed and skill alone would not win the day. I lunged in once more, this time overextending my arm leaving it exposed. She brought both knives down, severing my hand at the wrist. Her eyes widened in that moment as I brought my other shiv up deep into her chest. Long years of un-death had taught me that dismemberment was merely an inconvenience for the Forsaken. We stayed frozen in that moment as soft flakes drifted down upon us.
The trumpets of the Stormpike crashed through the tranquility. The battle was over, the Alliance had prevailed. But as I settled her softly into the snow, I cared not for the defeat. For I had won my own victory that day, one that would give me a small measure of peace in the long years of cold un-living that would follow.