I usually stick with the in-game sound, but if it's a game with no music or with repetitive music that I'm sick of hearing, and if it's not a game where sound is particularly important (Thief, Penumbra), I'll just turn the sound off and play some heavy metal instead.

For some reason, Overkill's album ReliXIV is the perfect complement to Blake Stone.

I spent quite some time making my own ambient mix for Oblivion. I didn't really fine tune it as much as I'd like but it's something I'd definitely go back and work on.

Unreal Tournament 2004 plays well with choral soundtracks going all epic on your speakers. A game session is a simple action string of killing everything that moves and doing so with the voices of a loud chorus and orchestra is just as good as doing it with hardcore rock.

Fallout: New Vegas.

Within a few hours I'd heard so many repeats of certain radio songs that I just went batshit insane. In game that is. I can't walk into a room in that game and not immediately seek out any and all radios and switch them off.

To this day I feel the game would be even better if someone would just make a modification that let me switch radios off by shooting them. Alas they're indestructible.

I'm sure the developers foresaw this. Why else include that pithy mission at the very start to repair that bartender's radio. Repair? Lady, how the fuck did they destroy it, that's what I wanna know!

The repetitive trance works wonders when running from one end of the map to the other however (like painted flames on the car, it makes you go faster!), and metal is nice in combat.

Not that Blizzard's hired composers and orchestras don't produce fitting and well-sounding tracks (hell, I listen to the soundtracks outside the game as well), but sometimes a change is nice.

Heh, that would be Big Iron. There is a bug in the playlist that ensures it plays more than any other song. Download the NV version of GNR More where that came from or the NV Radio Extender to add songs of your own to Mr New Vegas' playlist.

I have a story a bit like that. Except it was Half-Life 1 and Yellow Submarine. Didn't fit quite so well.

Oooh boy does it! Very glad for the radio mods

I used to use CDs with games that had CD audio scores (like Quake 2). But I can't really remember what I used with what game.

I like Trent Reznor fine, but the sound track for Quake wasn't particularly well thought out. Not that it's entirely his fault, the game in general couldn't decide where it was set. You've got medieval themes, technology themes, it's a design disaster from start to finish in terms of design.

But, it's saving grace is that it's a FPS and quite frankly, plot is beside the point, it's no wonder that it took so very long before there were any decent games of that genre that included any plot at all. Painkiller was one of the notables to just admit that it's not a genre people tend to turn to for a good plot. And that's the problem right there. Quake wasn't designed to be anything in particular, they more or less nailed the gameplay, but the design elements were mailed in. The issue I have with his work on the game is that the soundtrack sounded as if it was written for something else and failed really to express the particular Quakeness of Quake.

I ended up playing without it most of the time just because it didn't really add anything. FPS is a tough genre to right music for. You've got no particularly good way of knowing where a person is going to be when they're listening, unlike other genres where there's identifiable plot points to work off of.
Is that what was going on there? I thought it was just because the selection was really limited that the songs seemed to play all the time. In retrospect, a DLC pack of more songs would be very much appreciated.

What I like about the songs on that soundtrack is they all fit the theme of the game, and they're all good songs. The problem I have is that even good songs tend to wear at you after 30 or 40 hours of repetition and a game like this is going to be played for a lot longer. And having to choose between radio on and missing what's being said is kind of annoying.

But, then again, I chose to get the PS3 version, so no mod fixes for me.

Age of Empires 1 + Within temptation - Enter. I thought it was a good match.