Underrated Montage of the Week #5 - Serious Business

Gameplay by: Red Bull Sniper

Edited by: Red Bull Sniper

Date of Original Release: 7/11/2010

Current View Count: 35,410

Funtages don't come along very often, and they desperately do. However, it's easy for funtages to flop through poor execution, and this montage is... definitely not an example of this. I don't really have any sort of backstory for this montage, so let's jump right in.

Gameplay: In my opinion, this funtage, like other great funtages such as the Dead Serious Tage and Jaroozabongler, has its fair share of borderline if not straight-up sub-par clips. However, this makes complete sense and I'm perfectly fine with it, because these videos tend to come from your average Joes rather than your big stars. And, while the montage does have its share of "meh" clips, it has its share of awesome ones as well, like the 2v2 overkill extermination at the end, and the overall caliber of the traditional gameplay is still above average. Moving aside from the traditional gameplay, the bloopers are what make this video great. I laughed at a lot of the clips, like the guy killing himself with the trip mine in the beginning and especially at the scene with the epic music when he's sneaking up on the 5 guys hiding in the Snowbound catacombs. Lastly, the clips have a ton of variety, even the multikills. There aren't many multikills from overdone "montage-kid" spots, and the rest of the gameplay has everything else besides your multikills, chokes, betrayals, WTF moments, etc.

Editing: If one were to evaluate this montage's editing by your conventional standards, it wouldn't score very high. Some of the angles are just atrocious, the text is plain, and the syncing is there, but nowhere near perfect. However, this isn't your conventional montage, so let's just throw that all away.

The crappy white text plastering the gametype name in the bottom right with "MLG" is fucking hilarious. I've always been pissed off with people who whine at literally every single video that isn't completely dominated by MLG footage, and this one line of text was a simple, funny, and very effective way of parodying of this mentality. Thank you Red Bull Sniper. While we're on the subject of parodies, I absolutely loved all of the references to famous montages such as Apex, Dualtality, and Neighbor and Hysteria's dualtage. The majority of the humor in this montage is incredibly simple and isn't much more than a couple lines of text (intro, MLG label, quote from Carl Sagan), but the incredibly simplistic style gave the montage a great self-mockery type of humor while being very funny. Overall, the editing of this montage fit the feel it was trying to go for very well, and since I don't really have a section for this, the soundtrack's fantastic as well. It's diverse and it also fit the montage's theme very well.

Flaws:
- The quality. Similar to the gameplay and editing, it does add to the self-mockery style of humor this montage goes for, but it still irked me because it looked like it was captured in HD and then rendered incorrectly.

Serious Business is an incredibly funny Halo 3 montage, which differs from the norm and has soul behind it. For me, a lot of montages seem to be the same thing over and over again, because they're not personal at all. The gameplay isn't captured by whose montage it is, the editing isn't either, and the clips, for the most part, follow your conventional montage multikill standards so they almost never leave an impression. This, on the other hand, has someone getting gameplay, editing it himself, and injecting his own humor and creativity into it in order to make the experience original and more personal. Yes, some of gameplay isn't so great and the angles are pretty iffy, but for me, this lack of a professional touch made the montage work better with the feel that it was going for. At 35,000 views, this montage certainly isn't unknown, but I still feel that it's very underviewed given how entertaining it is relative to the majority of videos out there. Also, here's the trailer for this montage if you're interested. It's not as funny as the actual montage in my opinion, but it does have good humor and is a very enjoyable watch.