Friday, May 18, 2018

Ep. 109: A Drive in Common

How would you like to hear music analysis based on entirely erroneous information? Hi, we're Josh and Emily and this is the third act of the Unreasonable Attribute Zone. Here we do things like: pitch 80s action shows; give Halloween safety tips; and talk about ToeJam and Earl at great length. This is, as usual, all served on top a bed of piping hot jams. Stick around for a package unopening and maybe some kind of bonus track?


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This episode was made possible by:
Game Track Title Composer(s)
Valis: The Legend of a Fantasm Soldier The Fantasm Soldier Shinobu Ogawa, Minoru Yuasa, Hiroaki Kai, Toshihiko Miyoshi (arr.)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III Brave Steel Hayato Sonoda, Takahiro Unisiga
Maplestory BadGuys (Kerning City) CODASOUND (Jun-Hee Lee)
Luigi’s Mansion Main Theme Kazumi Totaka, Shinobu Tanaka

...and listeners like YOU.


  1. TJ&E may or may not have made up new chill lingo for their characters, I don’t remember. The first two games were heavily influenced by Parliament Funkadelic, and creating weird words was something they did. So whether the lingo was lifted from P-Funk or created specifically for the games, it was still an homage to Parliament’s style.

    As to your open question of whether we think human intelligence has become less advanced at some point in history or if it’s possible, of course it is. It’s happened. It begs the question of whether we’re talking microevolution or macroevolution, but I’ll leave that for another discussion.

    We can see through history that average human intelligence has dropped at times, and also through logical deduction. Modern Darwinian theory holds that the fittest survive to pass on their genetic information, and by extension the traits that made them the fittest(the fact that Darwinism defines the “fittest” traits as those which make individuals most able to survive and pass on genetic information is circular reasoning, but that’s also a discussion for another time).

    It is not a forgone conclusion that higher intelligence is always beneficial to reproduction. During certain periods in history, it certainly would have been better to be strong than smart. The medieval period seems to bear that out, but again, this is more of an example of microevolution or local evolution than something universal. Moreover, it can be said with relative accuracy that the most intelligent, ‘advanced’ societies are also the ones that reproduce the least. So if we look at evolution in the popular way, which is almost as a being with agency, it’s apparent that it’s not always in evolution’s best interests(that of reproduction) to have higher intelligence.

  2. I felt compelled to follow through on the image of this TV show you guys conjured up.


    I think the show is probably called Unreasonable Attributes.

  3. I wanted to add to Emily's points about OC Remix and recognizing tunes from games we've never played... With all of these gaming music podcasts, there are tons of VGM tracks that have become late-bloomer hits. Now that I listen to a bunch of VGM podcasts, I'm realizing that there are universally loved songs from games that nobody particularly cared about as video games, or even knew of. I think this is a wonderful thing that has resulted from VGM podcasting. It's a hidden music, and part of the fun of it is unearthing all of these forgotten gems. So many great pieces of music would have been lost if it wasn't for the larger VGM community, from the people who rip the music from the games, to the podcasters and fans who help establish new tastes for old music. This area of music is finally getting some of the recognition it deserves. I'm happy I played a very small part in that by getting people to recognize the beauty of mahjong vgm. :)

  4. The Valis track you selected is from the title screen.