Have We Already Witnessed the Best?

I'm actually going through my first ever purge of music from my collection. I'm a huuuuge game music fan (I used to run a radio show dedicated solely to it during college, and ran a bigmog.com-like website to get more game music out there).

Over the last 10 years, I've amassed about 10GB of various specific game music mp3s - these are individual handpicked songs, I don't keep full albums around, just the songs I really like. I'm going through now and getting rid of songs that don't do anything for me anymore, and the carnage is surprisingly high.

The process is making me painfully aware of how much the emotion of particular games, and the easy attachment you give out when young, influenced my musical tastes at the time. Don't get me wrong, I'm keeping plenty of awesome game music, both old and new, but I cringe at some of the songs I remember showing to people when I was younger to try to get them to admit that game music has merit. I can do a better job now at recognizing more "objectively" good game music precisely because I have more emotional distance.

I guess this isn't really a direct answer to the original poster's question, but it's on my mind right now, so I thought I'd share.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

If we're tossing out favorite very recent soundtracks, most definitely I would include:

- Musashiden II (the OST to Samurai Legend Musashi)
- Pixeljunk Eden
- Within a Deep Forest
- Opoona (hear hear, Kaleb)
- Persona 4
- Sigma Harmonics

There's nowhere I can't reach.