March 6, 2011
Ultimate is a sport similar to football or rugby, played with a 175 gram flying disc (otherwise known as a Frisbee). The object of the game is to score points by passing the disc to a player in the opposing end zone, similar to an end zone in football or rugby.
Players may not run with the disc, and may only move one foot while holding the disc (pivoting). While originally called Ultimate Frisbee, it is now officially called Ultimate because Frisbee is the trademark, albeit genericized, for the line of discs made by the Wham-O toy company.
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March 3, 2011
Lim Yo-Hwan (b. 1980) of South Korea, known by the pseudonym Boxer, is one of the most successful players of the real-time strategy computer game StarCraft to date. Dubbed The Emperor by his fans, he is the most popular Starcraft player with a fan club of more than 1,000,000 members.
Lim has a record of 547 wins and 416 losses (56.80%) in his professional career. He is one of the highest-paid professional gamers, with annual earnings that exceed $300,000 US Dollars and endorsement contracts that bring in an additional $90,000 per year.
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March 3, 2011
Lee Jae-Dong (b. 1990), nicknamed The Tyrant, is a South Korean professional StarCraft player representing team Hwaseung Oz. He is currently ranked second in the world by the Korean E-Sports Association and by ELO ranking (a rating system invented by Arpad Elo, used in chess to place players into categories – 2500 and above is grandmaster level). He is one of two players to achieve a winning percentage above 66% with a career record of 482 wins and 219 losses (68.76%).
The computer game StarCraft has an active professional competition circuit, particularly in South Korea. Two major television game channels, Ongamenet and MBCGame, each run a league viewed by millions of fans. Starting in about 2002, pro-gamers started to become organized into teams, sponsored by large South Korean companies like Samsung and SK Telecom. StarCraft is also the most popular computer game competition during the annual World Cyber Games thanks to its Korean fanbase, and it is among the world’s largest computer and video game competitions in terms of prize money, global coverage and participants.
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March 3, 2011
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a 2007 American documentary film that follows Steve Wiebe as he tries to take the world high score for the arcade game Donkey Kong from reigning champion Billy Mitchell. The film premiered at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival.
A scripted film adaptation is already in the works. Director Seth Gordon has said that the movie might be a sequel instead of a remake, telling the story of how the documentary changed both men’s lives, as well as their continuing rivalry.
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March 3, 2011
Electronic Sports, abbreviated e-Sports is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. Other terms include competitive gaming, professional gaming, cybersports and V-Sports. Games that are played as electronic sports normally belong to the real-time strategy (RTS), fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), massively-multiplayer online (MMOG), and racing genres. They are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels including in leagues and tournaments.
Recently, the massively-multiplayer online roleplaying (MMORPG) subgenre in particular has generated online tournaments. The most notable is perhaps World of Warcraft, which holds annual leagues with cash prizes for their tournaments. The prizes for 2010 World of Warcraft Global Arena totaled over US$200,000, with a first prize of $75,000.
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March 3, 2011
Frag is a video game term originating from the word fragging, a term indicating to kill an unpopular superior officer with a fragmentation grenade. A frag is roughly equivalent to ‘kill,’ with the typical main difference that the player being ‘”fragged’ can instantly respawn (play again) in most games, i.e. the ‘kill’ is only temporary. In games it is mainly used as a kill count and score system. The term is used in various first-person shooter games like Quake by software developer Id.
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March 2, 2011
Pleo is an animatronic dinosaur toy designed to emulate the appearance and behavior of a week-old baby Camarasaurus. It was designed by Caleb Chung, the co-creator of the Furby.
Chung selected this species of dinosaur because its body shape, stocky head, and relatively large cranium made it ideal for concealing the sensors and motors needed for lifelike animation. Each Pleo ‘learns’ from its experiences and environment through a sophisticated artificial intelligence and develops an individual personality.
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March 2, 2011
Marvel vs. Capcom is a series of fighting games created by Capcom in which characters created by Marvel Comics and Capcom’s own characters appear together. While it was the first Vs. series involving Capcom, the Marvel brand exists to distinguish it from Capcom’s other Vs. series with SNK (Capcom vs. SNK), and Tatsunoko Production (Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars).
The Marvel characters depicted in these games were often based on their incarnations in various 1990s animated series (particularly X-Men), and were often voiced by the same voice actors.
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February 24, 2011
The ear pull is a traditional Inuit game which tests the competitors’ ability to endure pain. In the ear pull, two competitors sit facing each other, their legs straddled and interlocked. A two-foot-long loop of string, similar to a thick, waxed dental floss, is looped behind their ears, connecting right ear to right ear, or left to left.
The competitors then pull upon the opposing ear using their own ear until the cord comes free or one player quits from the pain. The game has been omitted from some Arctic sports competitions due to safety concerns and the squeamishness of spectators; the event can cause bleeding and competitors sometimes require stitches.
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February 24, 2011
Stadium Events is the English title of the video game ‘Running Stadium’ by Bandai. The game was released for the NES in Japan in 1986, in the United States in 1987. It was one of two games released in North America that were designed and branded for the Family Fun Fitness mat, a short-lived running pad accessory for the NES. The North American, or NTSC, version of Stadium Events is universally accepted as the rarest and most valuable licensed NES game. A copy sold January 2011 on ebay for $22,806.00, the highest price ever paid for a video game
The two Family Fun Fitness-branded games that had already been released, as well as Bandai’s version of the running pad accessory, were pulled from shelves and presumed destroyed. Because of this odd sequence of events, only 2000 copies are believed to have been produced, of which it is estimated that 200 copies reached consumers before being recalled. Today, collectors who follow the online sale of rare video games believe that fewer than 20 complete copies of the game exist, only two of which are known to be factory sealed.
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February 24, 2011
The T206 Honus Wagner baseball card depicts Pittsburgh Pirates’ Honus Wagner, a dead-ball era baseball player who is widely considered to be one of the best players of all time. The card was designed and issued by the American Tobacco Company (ATC) from 1909 to 1911 as part of its T206 series. Wagner refused to allow production of his card to continue, either because he did not want children to buy cigarette packs to get his card, or because he wanted more compensation from the ATC. Only 60 to 200 cards were ever distributed to the public.
In 1933, the card was first listed at a price value of US$50 in Jefferson Burdick’s The American Card Catalog, making it the most expensive baseball card in the world at the time. It has retained that title and is currently worth up to $2.8 million. The most famous T206 Honus Wagner is the ‘Gretzky’ card. The card has a controversial past, as some speculate that it was once altered, based on its odd texture and shape. In 1991 the card was sold to ice hockey figures Wayne Gretzky and Bruce McNall for $451,000. In 2007 they sold privately to an anonymous collector for $2.35 million.
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February 24, 2011
The Waimea River is a river on the island of Kauai in the U.S. state of Hawaii. At approximate 12 miles in length, it is one of the longest rivers in the Hawaiian Islands. It rises in a wet plateau of the island’s central highlands, in the Alaka’i Swamp, the largest high-elevation swamp in the world. It flows south, passing through the 3,000-foot-deep (910 m) Waimea Canyon, known as the ‘Grand Canyon of the Pacific.’
Due to wave action, sand gets pushed up into a large hill in front of the river each winter. This creates a natural dam that water collects behind for months, and which is about 20 feet above the level of the ocean on the other side of the sand berm. Every year some one digs a trench through the sand releasing millions of gallons of fresh water into the ocean. This produces a standing wave which is perfect for body boarding and surfing on.
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