Good list! I don’t remember all of those, but I do quite a few (excluding console games or we’d be hear all day!).
I’d add in, just off the top of my head:
World of Warcraft
Dark Age of Camelot (not Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, interestingly)
Mass Effect 1/2 (not 3)
Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim (despite the composer being a mega-creep)
Guild Wars (1 more than 2, also see above as it’s also Soule)
Path of Exile (this is a complicated one because I’d argue it used to have better music than it does now - they’re continually updating and adding to and replacing it, but for my money, at one point, it was even better than Diablo 2, musically, but isn’t right now.)
I know there are bunches of PC games I’m forgetting/missing out, as well as Atari ST/Amiga games, and obviously console games. In fact I will give a special mention to Streets of Rage 2, for being perhaps the first computer game I played which had “cool” music, as in actually relevant/modern, like, that didn’t feel like just “computer game music” (which, say, Wing Commander did, even though it was really good) or stuff your dad might have liked. And also WipeOut for having actual cool-person music on the soundtrack to the point where self-consciously hip non-gamers were convinced to play it because it had such an amazing “cool” vibe (music + visual design + type of game).
Also a special bad mention for Dragon Quest XI for having shit music. Dragon Quest VIII has great music, like a really good updating of the original tunes and stuff, not top-notch but really good. Dragon Quest XI is just fucking obnoxious musically, like someone playing a midi tuba directly into your ear - and the orchestral versions are, if anything, worse. Not in that they’re poorly executed by the musicians - quite the opposite. Nor poorly-composed, technically-speaking. But good god they’re loud, stupid, bombastic tunes which, especially when they’re repeated, are fucking annoying.
ME2 has probably the best music in the series - particularly towards the end, where it manages one of the combinations of what’s happening in the game with the music in gaming history, during the suicide mission. It’s all by the same people and main guy as ME1, too - Jack Wall. He inexplicably didn’t do any of the music for ME3, making a cryptic comment which either indicated he was burned out on ME, or had been replaced in some insulting manner. Certainly ME3’s music was quite a bit more “mainstream” (where ME1/2 are a sort of weird synth/orchestral combo that felt ahead of it’s time, even though it was I guess partially referencing Tangerine Dream and stuff) and a lot less memorable apart from the frankly-annoying piano twinkling main theme.
I feel you here. I often feel like more games = more problems when trying to choose what to play. I don’t remember ever having difficulty deciding what to play back in the 1990s where I owned at most* double-digit games and the practical limitations of finding cartridges, inserting CDs, and so on often contrived to make the real limit of “games you could play right now” even smaller.
Even in the earlier 2000s it wasn’t typically a huge issue, because it’s like, what’s installed, or what’s around? But post-2010 it’s got worse and worse, because instead of older games becoming unplayable or whatever, they’re just still there and could work fine, and even usually look/play okay, and suddenly you have this ever-expanding list of games. I don’t feel bad about not playing them, but you get this thing like with Netflix where you just go through this giant list and think “yeah I could play that” and then don’t.
And sometimes when you do decide on something, you can’t play it because of weird issues like the 2FA one you describe, or realizing that to play Skyrim/Fallout the way you remember, you’re going to need to install like literally 50 mods, and to work out how installing mods works and so on. Also Skyrim, even modded, looks bizarrely retro right now, I guess it makes sense given it’s a decade old but… I booted up Skyrim Enhanced, with a ton of mods to enhance it further, a few days ago, and it was like “Oh my god, is this a PS1 game?!” and obviously not, but some stuff which seemed fine even 2-3 years ago seemed really dodgy now. I’m going to blame games like Cyberpunk 2077 for spoiling me, graphics-wise.
* = technically not true, as when I got an Atari ST in like 1988, it came with 200+ games, it was part of the selling point, but an awful lot of those got played once, or a handful of times at most, or even never in a few cases.
