As I type this, Indie Game Music Bundle 3 has just 21 hours left on the clock. The package aims to give your ears a good rogering with the soundtracks to Terraria, Plants vs. Zombies, Dustforce, Ilomilo and Frozen Synapse, and is a cheap date, too — it’s available under the fashionable “pay what you want” scheme.

There’s a caveat, though — break the $10 barrier and you get a bunch of extra soundtracks, too. Specifically, you get the following additional albums on top of the already-awesome package detailed above:

• Offspring Fling Original Soundtrack — Alec Holowka
• Mubla Evol Ution: NoituLove 1&2 and More — Joakim Sandberg
• Cardinal Quest Original Soundtrack — Whitaker Blackall
• InMomentum Original Soundtrack — Gareth Coker
• Impeccable Micro — _ensnare_
• Bluescreen Chiptune/Jazz — Protodome
• Beautiful Lifestyle — George & Jonathan
• Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar — Disasterpeace
• Deorbit — Disasterpeace
• Gungirl 2 Original Soundtrack — Josh Whelchel
• Astroman Original Soundtrack — Jeff Ball
• The Blocks Cometh Original Soundtrack — Hyperduck Soundworks
• Fittest Original Soundtrack — Zircon
• Songs for the Cure ’11 — Various Artists
• Songs for the Cure ’10 — Various Artists

You may not be familiar with any or all of the above artists, but rest assured that this is a fantastic bundle to pleasure your lugholes with for 19 and a half hours, covering a wide range of different musical styles. To be honest, it’s worth your money for the fantastic Frozen Synapse soundtrack alone, which is aural sex.

Game music is traditionally a “love it or hate it” sort of thing, though in recent years we’ve started to see a huge shift in attitudes towards it. Whereas game soundtracks were once bleepy-bloopy loops made to fit into the amount of memory it takes to write a single sentence in a Microsoft Word document these days, today they’re impressive affairs that are frequently on par with movies.

In fact, big-budget triple-A video games (particularly those from the West) try a little too hard to be movies, with sweeping orchestral scores composed by the likes of Hans Zimmer. In some respects, these modern soundtracks, while impressive, have lost a lot of the character that game music used to have — by working around the technological limitations of the era, old-school game musicians came up with catchy earworms that you’d remember for years afterwards. This happens much less these days because composers can pretty much run free with whatever they want to do. As an exercise, hum the Super Mario Bros. theme to yourself now. Then hum the Modern Warfare 3 theme. You probably can’t do the latter. (Though you probably can hum the Halo theme, showing that some composers still “get it”.)

Anyway, my point is that soundtrack composers for independently-developed titles such as these tend to “get” what made game soundtracks of the past so memorable much better than those composing for big-budget titles, and these indie composers are then able to apply this knowledge to modern compositional techniques and technology in order to create some truly excellent pieces of music. Some deliberately make use of chiptune sounds; others have their own distinctive aural aesthetic. All are unique. All are most definitely worth your $10.

Grab a copy of the Bundle here.