This Week In Media: Music, Games, and More

A Very Smurt Retrospective Pt. 1: Early Career 7/28/20     DISCLAIMER: This is my first in a series of essays I'm working on called "A Very Smurt Retrospective". These essays will be full, thought-out, edited heavily, and will not include pictures or sources. These are fully opinionated papers on the career and meaning of Very Smurt going album by album. They'll probably release 1-3 times a month and will go by album. Only this essay and the essay reflecting on "Smurt's Christmas!!" and "The "Back" Pack!" will be the exceptions. The series will end after I release the final essay on "THE SMURT MIXTAPE" discussing the end of Very Smurt. According to my estimates, we'll probably finish this series up in November (or December if we have a few other topics to discuss). Thanks for reading this disclaimer, and I hope you enjoy the series.       Very Smurt’s music held its quality through the very end. It stood the test of ti...

July 24th 2020: Fanboy Roundup #3 7/24/20 DISCLAIMER: Really sorry to anyone who cares about my schedule for this screw-up. I'll try my best to not let it happen again, but I may face some more unavoidable and personal situations like this one. Most of this essay/collection of mini-essays was written by the end of the 24th, but I never found enough time to finish writing. That doesn't include editing, re-writes, and adding photos. I'm aware that none of these things are valid excuses, but please bare with me when I say I have my own personal reasons. Also, this one's gonna be meshing big things in gaming with new music that I like instead of doing one essay per grand topic. Let me know if you like them this way or the other way, but I'll probably do this way from here on out just because it's more fun. Topic #1: New Logic Album Most artists take at least two years to put out a quality record like this one, but this album was recorded, finished, and I...

The Reasons We All Foolishly Hoped for Something Big on July 20th 7/21/20 At 12:00 AM on July 20th, we received a Tweet officially from Nintendo stating that there would finally be a Direct in only 10 hours. Though, they said it came with a catch, but we couldn’t grasp how big of a catch that would be until we finally saw the direct. As fans, we should not have expected anything from this because it clearly wasn’t anything big. They claimed that it would be a small presentation of a handful of games that had already been announced. Then again, because of this, we had the right to expect everything. The words “already been announced” in the minds of our wildest pipe dreams meant Metroid Prime 4, Breath of the Wild 2, and possibly Pikmin 4 or a Pikmin 3 port. They had all been announced, through teaser trailers or verbal confirmations, and we knew one of these had to be slated for a 2020 release. Nintendo was going up against new consoles from PlayStation and Xbox this holiday...

Oliver Tree - Ugly is Beautiful (Review) 7/17/20 From his fast, distorted pop-punk songs to his more EDM-focused rap songs, Oliver Tree has been a pioneer in today's genre-fusing scene. Over his musical career which began with his song with EDM producer Whethan from 2016. This song made a splash over the internet after Tree gained some traction from Vine and his relationships with YouTube comedian Cherdleys and friends. Since then, he's cultivated a perfect little style which he made an album with and released it finally last night. It's been a long ride for us impatient fans, but we've finally made it to the release of Ugly Is Beautiful. The album throws us right into the action as it does with most songs. The vocals in ever song other than "1993" begin with vocals over an intro or pre-chorus section that will likely be repeated. Track one was a personally pleasant surprise. It was one of the only tracks that Atlantic Records didn't force him...

Microsoft Flight Simulator Discussion 7/14/20 From the moment I discovered Microsoft Flight Simulator in my YouTube recommended page, I knew this was going to be a very special game. The flight simulator genre is something very new to me and something that I’ve barely experienced. Though, from what I’ve researched, this game seems to be top tier; some predicting it to be the best flight simulator of all time. The trailers, confirmed rumors, and technical specs give us more than enough information to dissect this game and see if it will live up to that name. First things first, it makes sense to discuss the obvious elephant in the room here: the map. The developers of this game put in so much care and dedication to the map and the vast open world the game has to offer. To my knowledge, this is the first ever flight simulator to feature a map as big as planet Earth itself. The game enhances and recreates items from the mostly reliable Bing Maps and lets the player fly ov...

Proving Why “Paper Mario: The Origami King” Will Fail to Impress 7/10/20 DISCLAIMER: This is my opinion. When The Origami King comes out, I could be proven completely wrong and it could be an undeniable masterpiece. Then again, my reasons are still pretty good, and here's why that's probably not going to happen. As a series, Paper Mario has seen an arc of quality. In the year 2000, we were given the first entry; a unique game with a storybook pop-up style which helped it tell a story of its own. This game was known for being the only Mario RPG at the time aside from the much less well-known “Super Mario RPG”. The game sold pretty modest; pushing about 1.4 million units in the lifespan of the N64. Like a lot of Nintendo’s more ambitious IPs, Paper Mario gained a cult following and was widely accepted by its fanbase. After it, though, came what many Paper Mario fans consider their favorite game of all time: “Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door”. This game expanded ...

Fuller House Spoiler-Free Review 7/6/20 Fuller House is a show that first premiered as a Netflix Original Series in February of 2016. Full House is a different show that first premiered on ABC in September of 1987. As you can imagine, the show that came nearly 30 years later is a spinoff of said other show. It's honestly hard to say more about Fuller House. Of course, one could go over its good and bad parts, but it has one main flaw that must be pointed out. I'm honestly not sure how many other reviews I'll be echoing in this review, but here we go anyways. Fuller House is definitely one of those shows that is clearly somewhat bad, but you can't help but watch it all. Out of all these shows, I personally find Fuller House to be one of the best. It never felt repetitive, and while it was predictable, it threw its viewers off enough to not get mad at it.  The one complaint I have about this show, and season five in particular, is that the show is exclu...

RandomCrazyStudios' First Half of 2020 Award Ceremony 7/2/20 The month of July means that we are somehow already halfway through the year. Getting this far in a year is a very existential moment for me, because I realize that if I'm lucky and live until seventy, the time I barely remember is already a 140th of my life. Nevertheless, we're here today to reflect on media in the past six months, not death. 2020 has brought us next to nothing compared to our normal amounts of mainstream music, video games, and shows. Though, I will review my favorites and least favorites of what we have seen. First, I'd like to get the only new video game I purchased this year out of the way. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has clearly been the hype of everything actually released in the video game world this year. It is an amazing game, and it innovates the series in exciting and new ways. Everything I have to say about ACNH has been said hundreds of times in hundreds of ways...