Distributed Systems Coursework and 80s Metal

Just recently I came across a post on John Romero's blog identifying him as another Guitar Hero maniac and detailing his wishlist for an 80s edition of the slick button-smashing madness. As close watchers of my picture stream on flickr are well aware of, a whole bunch of my friends and I got totally addicted to the game last year and organized quite a few party nights featuring temporary rock-stardom.

I can only join in on John's slating review of the songs announced/leaked so far for the upcoming edition of the game. The decade that saw the birth of Mötley Crüe and Great White as well as the rise of Van Halen, Metallica and quite a few more, certainly has more to offer ...

Fortunately my favorite sucker-for-attention game designer (only rivaled by self-proclaimed attention whore cliffyb) who undoubtedly features a certain inherent coolness, at least for the headbanger haircut and for founding one of the world's coolest game development studios, proves great taste and dedication in his song selection, even having grouped the songs for different difficulty levels.

Being a big 80s rock fan and spending last Thursday night through Friday morning hacking together lab coursework for a distributed software systems class, I decided to amp my motivation during my coding spree by digging up John's recommendations in my library and buying the rest from the iTunes Music Store. Since I am on the German iTMS, I had to make do with a watered down selection :( which yielded fifty-six songs though :) Enough to make the time from dusk till dawn much more pleasant.

Just in case you'd like to get your hands on some of the songs yourself and you don't feel like going through the trial and error process of digging up the available songs, I have exported my iTunes playlist with the song infos. Just download the playlist file and import it in iTunes via File>Import...


In case all this talk of 90s FPS game developer fame got you all excited, head over to your favorite bookstore and get your hands on Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, a great read on the birth and life of id Software. I had the book on pre-order in 2004 and went through it cover to cover in a single reading session.

By the way, for those looking for some sample code on Java RMI, socket and multi-threaded programming (or just struggling with getting their coursework done and looking for some inspiration), I'll post a link to the repo where my distributed software systems code resides in soon.