Video Games

A nonprofit group plans to present Willingboro's council tonight with a concept for a large-scale "River Route Edu-Tainment Complex" off Route 130. The complex would be built at Willingboro Lakes Nature Preserve and contain three large domes housing themed activities: video and virtual-reality games; a conservatory and botanical gardens; and a space museum and an interactive broadcast media exhibit. The cost would be $45 million to $50 million. James W. Adkins 3d, president and chief executive officer of Messengers of Peace Development, said the goal was to draw generations together while entertaining and teaching them.

MANY'S the "concerned citizens group" that's come down hard on video games. This season, though, these same Priscilla Goodbodies ought to be offering "most valued citizen" honors to game-company execs for all their family-friendly fare. Art and music, short-shrifted in schools, are being celebrated big time in new console-based games. And while video games used to earn a rep for breeding couch potatoes, many's the new game encouraging players to get off their duffs. Sparking that trend is the motion-tracking technology first seen in the Nintendo Wii and seriously embellished this year by Sony with Move peripherals ($100)

A big brother's revenge may have been the motive in a South Philadelphia video games store shooting that killed two innocent bystanders Sunday. And as both families grieved last night, the store owner attended a Cambodian prayer vigil for one of the victims - his fiancee. Thonny Prum, who owns the store at 15th and Tasker that bears his name, described the moment of the shooting. Prum said he was standing behind a large cabinet adjusting a VCR when a gunman walked in the door.

At last! Grommar, the dread Slime-Meister of Festerfen, is dead. But now, you must face Filbert, the psychotic biotic byproduct, who lurks, glorffing and snaglating, on Screen 6. Yes, heroic achievements are possible. If only, as you clutch the sticky joystick in your clammy fist, you could rid yourself of that sniggling, nagging voice that whispers: Nobody knows. Nobody cares. Joe Stratter cares. He thinks such heroic achievements in the lairs of electronic demons should be recognized, even celebrated.

Joey Mariano is a trained jazz guitarist. But his instrument of choice these days is a modified Sega Genesis or an antiquated Commodore 64 - or one of three Nintendo systems or eight Game Boys. "People give them to me," Fishtown's Mariano, 30, says a bit sheepishly. "They say they don't know what to do with them anymore. " But Mariano does. He regularly performs under the stage name Animal Style in a global subculture that merges art with gaming, programming, and a nostalgia for forgotten technologies.

Are you disappointed that the Eagles didn't make it to the Super Bowl? Mad 'cause the Phillies lost out on Bobby Bonilla? Wish the Flyers could've sent more than one player to the All-Star Game? Well, thanks to recently released football, baseball and hockey games for the 16-bit Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis video-game systems, you can control the destinies of your favorite teams. The new games are the best-programmed simulations of those sports available for video fans.

Borough officials hope that a $300 donation to the Folcroft Swim Club will ease the financial pain suffered when they shut down unlicensed video games at the club. The club was forced to remove five video games Tuesday after a warning from the borough last week that it would be fined up to $600 per day if it did not pay licensing fees. Borough Manager Samuel J. Campagna said he met with club president Joseph Papeleo Tuesday to discuss ways the video games could be licensed without financially harming the club.

Nintendo 64 and Sony PlayStation video games provided the perfect remedy for the West Deptford Junior Legion baseball blues. The 16-and-under boys limped into the July 3-6 tournament in Absecon having committed an astonishing 20 errors in their first 11 games and playing as if the other shoe had already dropped. But over the next 27 tilts, West Deptford recorded a 24-3 mark, committing only 15 errors and taking the team's first state Junior Legion Tournament championship with a 9-5 victory over Vineland on Aug. 8 in Union.

True, you can download Tetris from a friend and turn your spiffy new $100 calculator into the equivalent of a Nintendo Game Boy. But educators around the region say the handheld instruments - which can perform complex equations and even plot graphs on their built-in screens - have become integral to teaching math to high school and middle school students. Today, the calculators used in high school math classes are high-tech instruments powered by at least eight-bit microprocessors.

By Jonathan Zimmerman A few days ago, my students and I visited a boarding school in Abu Dhabi, where I'm teaching this month. Several of the school's teachers mentioned the growing weight problem here and elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates, where the obesity rate now ranks sixth in the world. I asked why. "Video games," the teachers said. That night, I read about the chorus of attacks on video games in America, where critics are focusing on their violent content in the wake of the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.