Do I get to have a cheeseburger with President Reagan after listening to it?

omeganuepsilon: Doesn't have anything on the Halo collection

According to the link Snapper Carr posted, it has "One Final Effort" from Halo 3, which is an excellent track (one of my favorites, and I think Halo 3 has one of the best video game soundtracks ever). Overall, the album looks like a good mix of excellent game music from all over. I'm looking forward to it.

What it is truly lacking, unless it's mixed in to the Zelda Suite, is music from The Ocarina of Time. While Zelda Reorchestrated has that and pretty much all other Zelda music taken care of, I'd really like to hear actual performance versions of a lot of that music.

bVork: Mass Effect 2's Suicide Mission in particular is so overdramatic that it's almost a self-parody.

Heh. I like the track, but this is so true. Was it the vocal "bah-bah-BAP babah-bah-BAP..." that did it for you? Or is that just me. ;)

bVork: It's just utterly ridiculous. I thought the Mass Effect 2 soundtrack as a whole was a massive step back from the understated analogue synth of the first game. Still a fantastic game, though.

I definitely agree about the music, and mostly about it being a fantastic game. ME2 dropped the good story-telling, good consistent universe, and fairly ok character building of ME1 in favor of "rule of cool" all over the place. Focusing only on the music, you can hear it in just about every track of the soundtrack, all trying too hard to be EPIC AND AWESOME!!!1!!1oneone, and like you said, almost ending up a self-parody. And I say this despite liking the sound track well enough (I'd say "The Long Walk" is the best track on the ME2 soundtrack). However, I do see it for what it is.

Same with almost everything else in the game. Random nameless merc bands suddenly got brand-names and matching armor. Vacuum rated armor got replaced with spandex and high-heels. Space-suits with helmets for dangerous environments or vacuums got replaced with breathing masks, so as not to cover up the oh-so-important skin tight body suits. Story was weak, inconsistent and made little sense, especially with the addition of the last DLC. Everyone says the real meat of the game was building the team, but aside from going out and collecting a bunch of folks there was no *team-building* at all. There were no missions designed to forge the group into a team. There was no interaction between all of the folks you pick up (aside from a catfight and an annoyance) that would build team cohesion. There was nothing teambuilding at all except for getting the characters and putting them on your ship. Even the characters didn't really get a chance to shine, because of that. It's like Bioware/EA had all of those stories for cool characters, and they threw them into the pot, but they forgot to mix.

But, I digress, and I'm starting to rant. And, all that despite actually liking the game quite a bit (I've just put in my 300th hour, and I still have probably about 15-20hrs left on this play through, which is meant to be my "canon" play-through to carry into ME3). I do like the game well enough. If anything I'm just disappointed by what it could have and should have been.

We'll just have to see if ME3 redeems it or not.

PonceAlyosha: The London Philharmonic Orchestra actually does a ton of game music. They recorded the first OST for Xenosaga, which is one of Mitsuda's best works.

/nerrds

I found Xenosaga I lacking, specially vis a vis Chrono Trigger/Cross/Xenogears. Heck, several parts of the game had no music at all in Xenosaga I

Xenosaga II and III got a bump in their OST with Yuki Kajiura

PonceAlyosha:
Speaking of which, Orchestral version of "A Light from the Netherworld from Xenogears" (new window) and The Treasure that Can Not Be Stolen from the same. (new window)

Those are beautiful~

Have you check http://xenogears.ocremix.org/ ?