Have We Already Witnessed the Best?

I'll jump in and defend Western game music too. A lot of great artists out there. In addition to the mostly great music Tommy listed, I'd recommended most of LucasArts' adventure soundtracks, the Need For Speed series, the Command & Conquer series, the Total War series, a whole load of indie game scores, and a lot of scores from the Genesis and SNES era. Some new releases I would recommend include Mirror's Edge, Assassin's Creed II, Dragon Age: Origins, inFAMOUS, Dead Space, and Halo 3: ODST.

There is some American VGM that I'd classify as "film composers poorly doing a side job" like Steve Jablonsky's recent inheritance of The Sims and Gears of War (boring and derivative in my opinion). I'm not a big fan of hyper-bombastic scores like Crysis either. But overall, I think there is a growing number of talented people in the industry and many scores on par with film scores and Eastern releases. Although I don't think Japanese game music should imitate Western game music, I think a lot of Japanese companies would also benefit from aspiring to their production values too.

That said, I think it's Japanese game music that I'm finding the most sterile at the moment. Things should improve, but I also agree we're past the first set of glory years. For my personal tastes, I'd classify those as 1995 - 2000, but I appreciate others prefer the similarly wonderful SNES and NES years. Just my thoughts too.

Most amazing jew boots