This Week In Media: Music, Games, and More

  Gorillaz - Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez (Review) 10/28/20 As a Gorillaz fan, one may think I was unimaginably excited when I heard word of a brand-new seventeen-track album. While I was certainly excited, it would not have compared to another full-length album, because " Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez" is not an album. If anything, it is a glorified collaboration project that extends to be a pretty hefty length, and could easily throw fans off. This album's marketing with its singles threw it off greatly. Many fans, myself included, thought that Gorillaz would stick with their originally-announced plan of releasing one song every month and having a twelve track compilation to show for it by the end of the year. Naturally, many fans suspected the pandemic had thrown things off, because we did not receive the initial "single per month" quota stated in January. By the end of October, however, we got five extra new tracks added to that initial ...

  October 24th, 2020: Fanboy Roundup #6 10/24/20 Topic #1: Fire Emblem Migrates West for the Winter April 20th, 1990 marked not only the tragic death of Scottish actor Alex McCrindle, but also the release of the first Fire Emblem game in Japan. The game has perhaps one of the best names of the first installment in a game franchise, with "Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light". This game was famous for never coming to western audiences, but to mark the broader year of its 30th anniversary, they are finally porting it to the Switch. Interestingly enough, it's not coming over in the form of Nintendo's online Virtual Console, but as a six-dollar eShop title. Though, surprisingly, it's also being released alongside many brand new collectibles and trinkets for fans of the "Fire Emblem" franchise (pictured above). There's certainly a lot of content here, and even though I'm not a huge "Fire Emblem" fan myself, I can easily apprecia...

  Westside Gunn - WHO MADE THE SUNSHINE (Review) 10/20/20 Going into this review, it was honestly hard to find a list of words to write that could fit this album. Though, if I had to find a few, they would include: amazing, refreshing, and beautiful. Perhaps it's just a sheer love for this style of hip hop, but throughout its time with me, this album proved its worth as more than good just because of its good style. The beats, verses, hooks, and overall performances deliver almost every time in every place of this album. The lyrics can go awhile without getting too deep, but that works perfectly for this style, hence MF DOOM; my personal favorite rapper of all time. Due to the consistent themes and vibes of each song, the album flows together really well. In turn, it feels like more of a mixtape than a commercial debut album, but it's still great nonetheless. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's not waste anymore time. The first thing here that is completely abundant ...

  A Very Smurt Retrospective Pt. 4: Succumbing to Commercialism 10/17/20 Sometimes, an artist or other musical act won't find their definitive style right away. In the case of Green Day, their first album "39 / Smooth" was arguably sort of a mess, and never really followed the band's later 90s style. Afterwards, they fit into that style pretty nicely with "Kerplunk", and explored it much deeper in its successor, one of their best albums, "Dookie". With Very Smurt, though, it took him an EP, more singles, and a debut album to fit into the style of "Jeanyus". Of course, this album was diverse stylistically at a lot of points, but all of the main tracks fit within one certain type of style. This threw some fans off about the album, but this album was still undoubtably good in its own ways; whether these ways be different from Meme God or not. Following "Jeanyus", however, we recieved what was probably Very Smurt's most stylisti...

  Let's Discuss Gorillaz's "Song Machine" Album 10/13/20 Somewhat recently, the notoriously virtual band of English humanoid monkeys called "Gorillaz" announced their latest project. It's hard to give this a certain name, (like an album or mixtape), because nobody is really sure what this is. Personally, I thought it was going to be more like what I heard that Gorillaz planned to do before. This plan was that Damon Albarn (the mastermind of Gorillaz's music, in a sense) was planning to release one new song each month of 2020. Each song would add up to twelve songs by the end of the year exceeding 25 minutes making it technically the length of an album, though without the songs having much if any correlation. This seemed like a pretty confusing and sketchy idea at the time, but I did not want to wait another seven years for the next Gorillaz album after "The Now Now". Overall, it was a strange idea that I honestly didn't like much at fir...

  How I Fell in Love with "Pikmin" in the Span of a Day 10/9/20 DISCLAIMER: This essay is gonna be way more personalized than most of my essays (basically I'll be saying "I" and "me" a lot and stuff). If you're a decently engaged Nintendo fan, you were probably informed of the Treehouse gameplay showcase on Wednesday. Most people were far more excited to see gameplay for "Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity", because "Pikmin 3" had already come out, and there wasn't a whole lot more they had to showcase. Naturally, I watched it all, because I love Nintendo, and I was blown away at how fun "Pikmin 3 Deluxe" actually looked. I had seen gameplay before this, but for some reason, it never really struck me how fun this game actually looked. Nonetheless, my memory is already somewhat blurred. The one thing I do remember was one of the game's players saying "look out for a demo on the eShop". Of course, I was v...

  The Nintendo Direct No One Saw Coming 10/6/20 It's funny to look back at September 4th of last year and see the outrage and controversy a direct without a whole lot of new first-party announcements. This direct still managed to be over thirty minutes long, and it's unimaginable to the people of 2019 what us fans would give for another one just like this. We did receive a pretty lengthy Nintendo Direct Mini this March, but it still wasn't anything like another full new major Nintendo Direct. Throughout the year we've had an overwhelming abundance of mostly false Direct rumors to get us excited for nothing, as we still have yet to receive a Nintendo Direct in 2020. The "July 20th" rumor did end up creating the "Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase" phenomenon, which sparked a lot more outrage than happiness with fans. After the multiple statements from Nintendo about the cancellation of these presentations and COVID still being as rampant as it alw...

  Joji - Nectar (Review) 10/2/20 Ever since the release of "In Tongues", Joji has certainly made a name for himself within the music industry. Rising to fame from his YouTube comedy sketches under the name TVFilthyFrank, Joji has now fully branched away from this name. Since then, he has been putting all of his content-making effort into making indie emo-pop that has ranged from amazing to amazingly mediocre. On September 25th, he released an album that I've been pretty torn on. Not a bad album, necessarily, but it's hard to call anything here truly astounding. There are quite a decent handful of songs that are only mediocre at best. A couple of his singles along with the "Love Us Again" leak, even though that song never made it on the album, had me hyped. Though, it's hard to say whether Joji's new album lived up to said hype. Starting off on the negative end, my first main gripe with this album is the kindredness this style can offer that comes thr...