Showing posts with label Hobbies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hobbies. Show all posts

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Sango Fighter

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"]centered centered (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]

Sango Fighter (武將爭霸) is a fighting game for DOS made by the Taiwanese Panda Entertainment and released in 1993. Set in the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history, it is very similar to Street Fighter, but with historical context. Shareware developer and publisher Apogee Software was planning on licensing and releasing the game in the United States under the title Violent Vengeance, but the plans for the deal fell through. Instead, the game was distributed in English under its original title by a Taiwanese company named Accend, albeit without official permission from Panda Entertainment.

In 1995, Taiwan's fledgling 16-bit Super A'can game console saw release of a cartridge version of Sango Fighter, completely programmed inhouse by a single employee of Panda Entertainment. Being a rushed port from the PC version using a confusing and buggy Super A'can development kit, this version of the game suffered from stale, awkward gameplay and quite a few glitches.

Sango Fighter was also released for the Japanese PC-98 computer, in 1995. For this release, a portion of the game's story text was translated into Japanese. It was otherwise identical to the original DOS version, upon which its code was based. This adaptation was produced by Great Co., Ltd., and released by Imagineer.


The game was illegally ported to the Sega Master System console, with the name Sangokushi, and released only in South Korea. This port is one of the larger games in the console library, with 8 megabits of data size.

A sequel was released in 1995, Fighter in China 2, with more characters and more detailed graphics. Fighter in China 2 also featured a conquest mode in which the player attempted to unify the empire by invading other nations. In addition, the kingdom of Wu was added to the game.

There may have also been a planned, but unfinished 3D sequel by Panda Entertainment.[2] However, the former owner of Panda's intellectual properties stated that no records of any such title exist.

"Sango" is a rough romanization of Three Kingdoms. Using pinyin, it would be romanized as "san guo".

While Sango Fighter was quite popular in Taiwan, a lawsuit by C&E Inc. (producers of the PC fighting game Super Fighter) stopped Panda Entertainment from distributing the game, let alone adapting it to other machines. Thus the game was never able to reach its full market potential.

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Sunday, January 20, 2013

The Big Green Egg

History



The Big Green Egg is commonly referred to as a kamado barbecue because of the origins of the basic design that lie in southern Japan.


The word "mushikamado" means "steam cooker" (from "mushi" meaning "to steam", and "kamado" meaning "cooker, oven, or kiln") The mushikamado was a device designed to steam rice and used by Japanese families for ceremonial occasions and took the shape of a round clay pot with a removable domedclay lid. It was also distinctive in that it featured a top damper and bottom draft door. The mushikamado first came to the attention of the Americans after World War II when US Air Force servicemen would bring them back from Japan in empty transport planes.[1] It wasn’t until the late 1960s that manufacturing started in the Americas. The Big Green Egg Company was founded in 1974 by Ed Fisher and is based in Tucker, Georgia in the USA. Production of the Big Green Egg takes place in Monterrey, Mexico by the company Daltile.

Fuel


The Big Green Egg is a charcoal barbecue - the manufacturers recommend lump wood charcoal because alternatives such as charcoal briquettes contain many additives that can contaminate the flavour of the food.[2] The sealed design of the grill results in a slow burn that uses small amounts of charcoal compared to a regular grill, and lump wood charcoal also creates little ash.

Uses


Big Green Eggs can be used for smoking or grilling and with the addition of accessories one can also bake bread or cook a pizza.[3]

Big Green Eggs come in 5 sizes with the largest being able to cook either, 2 20-pound turkeys, 24 burgers, 11 whole chickens, 12 steaks or 14 racks of ribs vertically

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Thursday, January 17, 2013

Hebert Arboretum

Hebert Arboretum

The Hebert Arboretum is a new arboretum located at Springside Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, USA. The Arboretum displays a diverse collection of trees and other plants in formal landscapes in a natural setting.

The Arboretum was officially established in 1999  to carry out a dream of former Parks Superintendent Vincent Hebert. A master plan was developed by students at the Conway School of Landscape Design in Conway, Massachusetts, and an ecological restoration and landscape design was created for the lower pond area.

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Monday, January 14, 2013

How to play Scrabble ?

scrabble

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by forming words from individual lettered tiles on a gameboard marked with a 15-by-15 grid. The words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary. Specified reference works (e.g., theOfficial Club and Tournament Word List, the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) provide a list of permissible words.

The name Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada; elsewhere, it is trademarked by Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and there are 29 different language versions. Approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and sets are found in roughly one-third of American homes

Game details


Further information: Scrabble letter distributions





A game of Scrabble in progress.



The game is played by two to four players on a square board with a 15-by-15 grid of cells (individually known as "squares"), each of which accommodates a single letter tile. In official club and tournament games, play is between two players or, occasionally, between two teams each of which collaborates on a single rack.[citation needed]

The board is marked with "premium" squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red "triple-word" squares, 17 pink "double-word" squares, of which one, the center square (H8), is marked with a star or other symbol; 12 dark blue "triple-letter" squares, and 24 light blue "double-letter" squares. In 2008, Hasbro changed the colors of the premium squares to orange for TW, red for DW, blue for DL, and green for TL. The original premium square color scheme is still the preferred scheme for Scrabble boards used in tournaments.




Blank Scrabble tile



Scrabble tile for "C"



Scrabble tile for "R"



Scrabble tile for "A"



Scrabble tile for "B"



Scrabble tile for "B"



Scrabble tile for "L"



Scrabble tile for "E"


The name of the game spelled out in game tiles from the English-language version. Each tile is marked with their point value, with a blank tile—the game's equivalent of a wild card—played as the word's first letter. The blank tile is worth zero points.



In an English-language set the game contains 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter's frequency in standard English writing; commonly used letters such as E or O are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. The game also has two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value. The blank tiles can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board, however, the choice is fixed. Other language sets use different letter set distributions with different point values.

Tiles are usually made of light wood - or plastics - are quadratic 19 x 19 mm and 4 mm thick and so slightly smaller than the fields. Only the rosewood tiles of a deluxe edition varies the width up to 2 mm for different letters. Variants for travelling have smaller tiles (e.g. 13 x 13 mm), such adopting debility of sight bigger ones. The capital letter ist printed on one side in black, plus to the right lower and smaller its value.

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