30 « March « 2012 « Coding Geekette

Video Games Retro Flashback

by sarah

Yesterday, on Twitter, I mentioned that my baby brother was complaining about Wiz Khalifa using a Chrono Trigger song as his background for “Never Been (Part 2)”. Then, someone asked what Chrono Trigger was, and that inspired this post. These are some of my favorite video games from my past.

Chrono Trigger (SNES)

File:Chrono Trigger.jpg

How many times did my brothers & sister ask me to save my game so that they could take their turns with the Super Nintendo? I definitely lost count, as I spent many hours playing as Chrono and friends, travelling through time to meet various characters in the timeline of present, past, and future, solving their problems and defeating the evil Lavos at the end. The game itself has over 13 different endings. The soundtrack is great, one I enjoy listening to even to this day. At the end of the day, Squaresoft put out a great RPG, which took up plenty of my time when I was younger. You can read more about Chrono Trigger on Wikipedia.

Dragon Warrior IV (NES)

Dragon Warrior IV Box

Before Chrono Trigger, Dragon Warrior IV was my RPG of choice. Walking between towns, defeating slimes, Ragnar had to save the kingdom of Burland. This was a 5 chapter RPG, part of the Dragon Quest series.

Burger Time (Intellivision)

BurgerTime Intellivision Title screen

This was probably my first video game addiction. Yes, I know I was only 2 years old at that copyright date. However, my dad got me into console gaming at a very young age. He taught me other games on Intellivision, but BurgerTime! was my favorite hands down. Apparently, I liked making hamburgers while avoiding evil eggs, sausages, and pickles!

Super Mario Bros. (NES)

When I was old enough to play console games without Dad’s help, I fell for the Super Mario Brothers series. While I didn’t like Super Mario 2 (as it didn’t seem to follow the original Super Mario), I did enjoy Super Mario 3 and a bunch of other Mario games while I could. From NES to SNES to N64, I enjoyed a variety of Mario games. I loved playing Mario and trying to rescue Princess Toadstool from Bowser (King of the Koopas), defeating Goombas, Koopa Troopas, and various baddies along the way.

My love for Mario Brothers games still sits with me today. When I found out I was pregnant, I knew I wanted to do a Super Mario Brothers themed nursery. And boy was I thrilled when my husband agreed to it! Below is a sneak peek of some of the Marios in the nursery:

Conclusion

These are a tiny glimpse of the games I used to play. Mind you, RPGs and puzzles are my favorites, but I also played other games as well, especially sports games like Double Dribble, Arch Rivals, Blades of Steel, and Tecmo Bowl. I’ve definitely been a gamer of some sort for most of my life, feeding into my competitive nature. Don’t be surprised if a random video game reference makes an appearance; you never know which game I’ll reference next!

Back to my Roots

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Google+ Pages SUX

by sarah

As some of you know, I’m one of the many people behind the various Stir Trek social media accounts. Recently, I was asked to set up a Google+ Page for the event, and I figured… “I’ve set up Pages on Facebook before. How painful could it be with Google+?”

Creating a Google+ Page

After seeing the Google+ Pages section off to the bottom right, I clicked that “Create a Google+ page” link. Choosing a category was difficult… was I creating a page for the Stir Trek brand? The Stir Trek organization? When in doubt, go with “Other”.

After creating the page, I needed to customize the public profile. This is where things got tricky. If you haven’t seen it, the Stir Trek logo is rectangular:

However, Google+ wants a square. Google+ – It’s no longer hip to be square. I really wanted to capture both the name and the Avengers “A” (as this year’s movie is The Avengers). I ended up settling with just the “A”.

All My Life’s a Circle

All these geometric shapes but not a rectangle! My next idea was to set up circles for the organizers and this year’s speakers. So I went about creating circles much like I did for my personal Google+ account. With the circles created, I was ready to add people to them.

Really? Hmm… I had tried adding organizers first but nothing worked. I started following the Stir Trek page on my personal account and then tried adding myself to the Organizers circle. That worked. But adding anyone who hasn’t added me didn’t work. Time to invite others to follow the Stir Trek page so that I can come back here and add them to my circles. Well so much for getting people in their circles before telling people about the page.

A Picture’s Worth 1000 Words

The one thing that seemed quite intuitive and easy to work with was the Photos section of the Page. I was able to create albums for past Stir Trek events and upload pictures without any problems. So if you want to see things such as the theater posters that our sponsors had designed for last year’s event or even the picture of transporting 50 dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, you can check them out in the Stir Trek Google+ Page’s Photos gallery.

A Mostly Frustrating User Experience = Unhappy User

These experiences are just some of the headaches I’ve had with Google+. It probably doesn’t help that I really haven’t adopted the Google+ platform personally – while people claimed that it would replace Facebook, I’m finding Facebook slightly less painful to use. However, because we have it set up, I will periodically post updates to the Stir Trek Google+ page and hope that my Google+ experience turns more positive.

SUX