(FORE-WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE DOES NOT INDUCE HUNGER - BUT A HELPFUL MESSAGE WILL BE INCLUDED HERE ANYWAY: DO NOT JUST EAT ANY MUSHROOM YOU COME ACROSS)

This is very unprecedented.

Valve must be getting a kick out of this. Most of the votes going for Gordon Freeman are actually votes for Valve, considering that over the past two weeks there have been massive rallying at the Steam forums. Valve never considered Gordon Freeman as its poster boy. Instead, the closest characters to being poster boys are these guys:

In fact, the first guy was supposed to be the mascot. The painful valve attachments are simply a statement of Valve's twisted sense of humor.

In any case, the number of votes for Freeman was tremendous, and as expected, triggered a whole lot of allegations of fraud - of which there likely is. Considering that there had been many infamous cases of digital skullduggery in just about every game that Valve has made, such as loopholes and bugs in Portal that let players skip puzzles entirely and countless speed-runs of the Half-Life games, one can very much expect that Valve's hardcore supporters will resort to dastardly means just to increase votes for a symbol of Valve.

Even so, there are more GameSpot users than the highest number of votes tallied in the competition so far. Sure, many of them likely belong to zombie accounts (pun intended) made by dastardly users, but it just goes to show how far Valve's hardcore supporters are willing to go, despite the risks. If only Link's fans were just as hardworking, even if for dubious reasons.

Mario's match with Gordon Freeman will likely be tainted with massive fraud in favor of Freeman as well, but that would be a testament to the dogged (but ugly) determination of Valve's hardcore fan-base. Would Mario's biggest fans resort to buffing up his votes by breaking some rules here and there? These methods would be like poisonous mushrooms and flowers indeed, but one that Mario will probably have to ingest to overcome Freeman.

"Amanita" would make a great-sounding name for a special artifact that Mario has to find to save the Mushroom Kingdom yet again - if only it isn't the most notorious toxic real-world mushroom.

P.S. It would seem that my Tagger Dabbler emblem is gone, for some reason that I cannot fathom. My best guess is that I have used so many tags, that the emblem awarding subrouting that GameSpot uses no longer recognizes the number of tags that I have used.