Ask Paul: December 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday! The first Ask Paul of December kicks off an end of year wrap-up in addition to its normal end-of-week duties.
Video game soundtracks
j5 asks:

Morning Paul! Total geek question here. What are some of your favorite video game soundtracks, movie soundtracks, movie scores, and do you have any goto video game/movie remixes on YouTube that you like to listen to? This Halo ODST one has been one of my goto for a long time, especially in the morning hours.

My wife and I were trying a local Indian restaurant the other night and whatever music they had on was so familiar, it triggered an almost visceral reaction. It wasn't this, but it very much sounded like the Narada new age (instrumental) music I used to listen to quite a bit. There was a period of time, through the mid-1990s, I guess, where I could safely buy anything this now-dead label produced and it would be good. But I still have a bunch of it, and it's good for background music if you're reading or writing or whatever. Oddly, it's also difficult to find on streaming services. But the Halo ODST music you link to above is in this general area too, and is quite nice.

Also not exactly what you asked, but when the original Quake came out, one of its features was that you could put a music CD in the CD player in your PC and use that as the music in the game instead of the Trent Reznor/NIN soundtrack that it included (which was quite good, actually). But I found something even better: I would put the CD in for the Halloween 4 soundtrack and listen to that instead. The main theme is a modernized and sped-up version of the classic Halloween theme, and it matches with Quake quite well, sort of like playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon over The Wizard of Oz.

Anyway. Yes, I have owned and still occasionally listen to a small selection of video game-based music that's interspersed with my Narada and other instrumental music. Oddly, there aren't that many.

The most obvious and relevant are the soundtracks to Halo and Halo 2 (Volume 2). Classic. The Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 soundtrack by Hans Zimmer is good. And Zimmer, generally, is excellent. Check out the song Vide Cor Meum from the movie Hannibal, which was reused in the movie Kingdom of Heaven. One of my all-time favorites. I have an album called Immortal that has some of my favorite video game music ever, from Shadow of the Beast and the original Turrican, but I can't find this online now. The original Beast music is by David Whittaker. But this take on the Beast main theme is pretty good, and modernized, and very reminiscent of the music from Millennium, which is one my favorite Narada albums, go figure. Oh, and the Millennium main theme is by, wait for it, Hans Zimmer. (Don't confuse Millennium here for the TV show made by X-Files creator Chris Carter. I did love that show, and the music is quite good too. But unrelated.)

I think that's most of it.

This isn't video game related, but ex-Windows chief...