This question really applies to people who analyze sound waves or do some type of studio recording.

First some context:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

Are there any game music albums that seem to be employing the loudness technique, especially remastered versions of old albums?

Uhh, welcome to the every cd made in the digital world since the 90s.

This has been a general trend of all recorded music, ever since analog machinery gave way to digital methods of processing audio, thus making it easier to compress the audio among other techniques...  It's hardly anything to fight over, and retaining maximum "purity" of the original sound is mostly justified when Live instruments are concerned.   (since vgm is basically entirely synth, it's a moot point)

Anyways, the person who's job it is to decide this is the Mastering Engineer, and it's up to their own discretionary judgement how loud to make it when they are finalizing the Master.

Some composers do their own, such as Shinji Hosoe who is the Mastering Engineer for all the discs for his company SuperSweep.   It's usually always printed in the Liner Notes what Mastering Studio is used.

I understand the point the video is trying to make, but the truth of the matter is, the record producer (or Mastering Engineer, per Carl) does own the volume knob.

According to my music database, the same trend is true for VGM:

Year |    Average Gain   | Number of Albums
1989 | -1.86272726411169 |  77
1990 | -1.91316326952786 |  98
1991 | -2.36950981927415 | 102
1992 | -2.70711539320361 | 105
1993 | -2.92364240149098 | 152
1994 | -2.72080247258239 | 163
1995 |   -3.203604648063 | 173
1996 | -3.99710784304668 | 206
1997 | -3.75139304222678 | 201
1998 | -4.32235740861739 | 266
1999 | -4.94988763812329 | 268
2000 | -5.55937221262086 | 223
2001 |  -5.4936666680155 | 272
2002 |  -6.0813333374105 | 286
2003 | -6.64892265120346 | 362
2004 | -6.56370967620563 | 248
2005 | -6.34703704572202 | 162
2006 | -6.58448864765127 | 176
2007 | -7.10975207991836 | 121

That was a pretty uninspiring video.

Funny thing is I sometimes wish they would apply volume compression (that's what the technique is, right?) more in the soundtrack world, particularly with film scores, which have a bad habit of having barely audible, quiet passages soon followed by loud booming segments.  If you're sitting at home in a quiet room with a high-end speaker system it may sound nice but under normal listening circumstances (in the car, on the street with headphones) you find yourself cranking up the volume just to hear the quiet parts, only to be blasted away when the loud parts kick in.

This would be a nice time to mention one of my favorite pieces of freeware, MP3gain, which allows you to set your MP3s to a similar volume level regardless of playback software and hardware used and with all changes being undo'able.  It will save your hand many trips back and forth to the volume control.

Quasi: Yep, the overall (RMS/Average) volume has always ramped up slightly with each passing year for all commerical discs, as shown.

Virtual: Yep, the Producer is typically sitting on a very plush and expensive sofa/couch during that mastering session, to oversee and give approval to the Engineer's work (at the rate of a few hundred bucks an hour)

Adam: Yep, that's the "dynamic range" when a song goes from pin-drop quiet to speaker busting loud, and the main genre of music that is very interested in retaining that varied range is classical music.  Most consumers want the song consistantly loud, for the practical reasons you mentioned.

The worst offenders I'm aware of (without even specifically looking for examples, I'm sure there are many more) are the Tales soundtrack of games with streamed music. The Tales of Symphonia (both), Tales of the Abyss and Tales of Destiny PS2 soundtracks are all heavily clipping(!), and the most ridiculous aspect about this is that just ripping the streamed data from the games and burning them as Audio CD gives one a far superior non-clipping result. (FMV music is never affected of this oddly enough.) Pure waste of CD "mastering" staff. The loudness race wouldn't bother me as much if mastering staffs would at least try to keep the result non-clipping.

Thanks for the great responses.  These responses give me a better perspective on game audio recordings.

About MP3gain and trying to normalize the dynamic range...is there software that does this to lossless formats like FLACs, AIFFs, and ALACs?

Not sure about others but you'd better use AACGain (if you're an iTune user I recommend you get iGain besides it) for ALAC. I once regretted using MP3gain on wave files.

I'd say Guilty Gear XX Original Soundtrack is one such album. It sounds very "muddy" when compared to for example Perfect Selection Dracula Battle. Even though it might be a desired effect, I think it sounds a lot worse.

Good to know this software exists.  Thanks.

i think this is what you're looking for
http://foobar2000.org/
use the feature ReplayGain

I've been meaning to ask this about the Guilty Gear X - Heavy Rock Tracks, but does anyone else that own this sountrack notice some crackling/distortion on some tracks? I noticed this at the very beginning of the "Still In The Dark" track, so I was wondering if anyone else has noticed that as well.