# (3)Portal vs (2)Mass Effect 2010

_source: (3)Portal vs (2)Mass Effect 2010 (revid 88701)_

## Results

**Round Three**

Sunday, December 12, 2010

## Ulti's Analysis

- **Division:** Southwest Division Semifinal
- **Match \#:** 108
- **Match Date:** Sunday, December 12, 2010
- **Vote difference:** 4,439
- **Oracle Expectations:** Portal - 58.97% 88 for - 0 against
- **GameFAQs Prediction:** Portal - 30.36%
- **Battle Contest Predictions:** Banked: 268 Portal: 5327 Mass Effect: 4303

It's rare a game looks so amazing in an easy loss, but Mass Effect gave us arguably the best loss of the entire contest here. Before this contest, I'm willing to bet less than 25% of gurus, if that, would have picked Mass Effect to beat Final Fantasy 12 in a direct match. For whatever reason, there's this incorrect and pervasive opinion that a big-name release in a series can't boost the entire series. Over and over, people brought up how badly Mass Effect did in 2009 when discussing this contest. And naturally, most of the people discussing this haven't actually played the games and look to old sets of percentages to decide everything in these matches. If orange juice ever beat milk in a popularity poll, I bet some of these people would start putting orange juice in their cereal.

So when Mass Effect scored nearly 46% on Portal, it turned a lot of heads. Can't blame Portal, either, because it went nuts between 2009 and 2010 thanks to Valve giving the game away for free, and overall had a great contest. Even the oracle, which time and time again prove themselves to be the smartest collective mind of the contest, totally crapped out on this. I believe only 9 people had Portal getting under 55% here, which shows the power of x-stats in how people predict contests these days.

The only thing to learn from Portal here is that it wasn't going to upset RE4. For Mass Effect, the game clearly boosted like hell from the release of Mass Effect 2 and anyone denying this is joking, wrong, or knows nothing about how the Mass Effect series works. I'm hoping 3 is released before our next character battle, because the chance of seeing Commander Shepard as a 1 would be hilarious.

Yes, the same Commander Shepard who was a part of this gem.

(I really need to go and order all those 2007/2008 matches in poll order, because 1st/2nd/3rd/4th place order is supremely dumb. Not as dumb as A BIG RELEASE IN A SERIES DOESN'T BOOST THE OTHER GAMES, but still dumb.)

## Match Trends

## External Links

- [Match Updates](http://www.gamefaqscontests.com/drupal/node/22?matchnum=4176&num=2)
- [Oracle Match Results](http://www.oraclechallenge.com/archives.php?contest=SC2k10&type=match&match=108)

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