Alright. Now normally, I don't care about modern video game music. The following are a couple of exceptions:
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura
http://www.mediaf!re.com/?ldmntt0fnyw Amazingly rich and textured music, performed by a real string quartet. The music, taking into account the steam-punk-ish bent of the game, has strong overtones of late 19th century Romanticism. The songs all have a peculiar sense of motion to them, both a driving, nearly mechanical harshness, and the soft, elastic ululations that a good string quartet excels at producing. This is probably my favorite game soundtrack.
In an interesting side-note, this was never made available for purchase: Sierra underwent an ownership change right around this time, and the game was never amazingly popular. For quite some time, people wanting to hear this soundtrack outside of the game context were restricted to grabbing some WAVs off the game disk, which were fairly low quality, as the game came on two CDs. But, rather recently, someone in Europe uncovered a disk of higher quality recordings, handed out for a promotion. This eventually made its way into the hands of an Arcanum fan-group that occasionally releases an unofficial patch. I grabbed the high quality WAVs, converted them to VBR MP3, and here we are.
Sim City 3000
http://www.mediaf!re.com/?zomymjrqzzf A more popular game, with an entirely different kind of soundtrack. Totally eclectic, the genres range from jazz to electronic to classical to minimalist atmospheric to some indescribable admixture of the above. Once again, all by live musicians, except in the more heavily electronic parts. Skillfully written and performed, this deserves to be appreciated as an independent album. It's actually made available for download on the SimCity website, but I've made it available here for your convenience.
EDIT:Uploads appear to be broken. Fixing now.
