‘Portal 2′ versus the worst corners of the Internet

Atlas, left, and Peabody, your avatars in Portal 2's cooperative campaign.

This past Tuesday showered gaming junkies with an embarrassment of riches, proffering two of the year’s best titles so far and hopefully setting up the next few months for the sort of retail bliss we enjoyed last spring.

I’m speaking specifically about Valve’s PORTAL 2 and Netherrealm Studios’ MORTAL KOMBAT reboot, the former of which has drawn such critical adulation that it’s almost a shoe-in for the Internet’s various game-of-the-year honors in December.

The hype is deserved, too, based on the time I’ve spent with “Portal 2″ since Steam unlocked it for PC players Tuesday. The game’s charms, from its tremendous vocal performances to the way it builds on the mysteries teased in the first PORTAL, are so earnest and so numerous that you’ll want to hop the first plane to Sea-Tac and hug each and every employee at Valve. That’s the sort of loving, inclusive genius that suffuses this sequel.

The new Mortal Kombat is just as eager to please, and the fact that it plays like an honest-to-God fighting game certainly helps its case. The coin-op characters you remember from 15 years ago are back in force, though virtually nobody from MORTAL KOMBAT 4 or beyond has survived the trip. And that’s sort of fitting, given that this is almost certainly the franchise’s best entry since 1995′s MORTAL KOMBAT 3.

But there’s trouble afoot. If you’re brave and weird enough to frequent Metacritic, an online aggregator of critical opinion and the Internet’s premier source of groupthink, you’ll find that both games are faring well among professional gaming outlets. As of Thursday morning, Portal 2 is rating in the mid-90s (out of a possible 100) across the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, while Mortal Kombat is pulling a very strong 86 on the 360 and PS3.

Metacritic user reviews for each game tell a different and altogether more irritating story. Where Mortal Kombat is concerned, professional and user opinions are almost perfectly in sync. In this respect, Portal 2 isn’t performing as well. User reviews (which operate on a 10-point scale, for some reason) have settled at 7.7 and 7.1 for the PC and console versions, respectively — not unbridgeable gaps, sure, but eye-raising ones.

And those are substantial increases from earlier in the week, when the scores hovered in the mid-4s, even as critical reviews soared.

The most commonly cited “complaints,” courageously compiled this week at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (in a post titled “Let’s Address Some Portal 2 Nonsense”), seem to be that:

—The game, which costs as much as $60 on consoles, lasts only four hours.

—It comes with $80 of downloadable add-ons.

—It suffers technically because it was developed for home consoles first and for the PC as an afterthought.

The Rock, Paper, Shotgun piece dismantled all of these claims handily, so I won’t rebut them in too much detail. Suffice it to say that the game easily offers 12 hours of play (more if you’re hunting for some really clever achievements and trophies); that the downloadable content is totally optional, entirely cosmetic and in no way enhances your actual experience; and that the game is a silky smooth showpiece on even modestly powered PCs.

The lies about the game’s length (the single-player portion alone has lasted me about six hours, and I’m just past the halfway mark; the easiest third of the multiplayer campaign has lasted me another two hours) seem especially poisonous, given the pointed brevity of the original Portal.

It’s difficult to say where the fabrications and half-truths started and why hundreds of people cared enough to smear them around the Internet. It could be a cultural issue. Maybe the world’s millions of Call of Duty fans finally agreed on something and organized a sort of Million Mouth-breather March against Portal 2, with its high-brow script and fancy puzzles and dearth of bullets.

Maybe they felt alienated by the critical establishment’s obsessive crush (as Joystiq’s Justin McElroy put it) on the first Portal. Maybe they couldn’t contextualize their rage after Valve’s outrageous and fraudulent Potato Sack stunt.

I don’t know what motivated them, and I’m feeling cautious about drawing any sort of concrete conclusion. The same Metacritic user furor erupted last month around DRAGON AGE II, and there’s little genre overlap between it and Portal 2. There’s also the incredibly dicey divide between professional gaming writers, most of whom are modest enough to call themselves “enthusiasts” rather than journalists, and the unwashed masses they’re paid to amuse.

It’s a silly issue, to be sure, and I hate to drive any more traffic to Metacritic by debating it. But it’s a disparity worth noting. The gaming industry as a whole, including shareholders, ad departments and PR folks, pay too much attention to Metacritic to let this sort of abuse go unexamined.