Video Games

When her 16-year-old son got into trouble last November, Rashida Anderson punished him and took away his PlayStation. That proved fatal. Following a 90-minute argument the day after Thanksgiving, police allege, Kendall Anderson entered his sleeping mother's bedroom, hit her 20 times with a claw hammer, and ultimately killed her. The story of Rashida Anderson's bloody last moments came out during her son's preliminary hearing Tuesday, when...

Looking to make a fortune overnight? You can take your chances with Mega Millions. Or you could develop a video game like Call of Duty: Black Ops. On its first day of release in November, the new mack daddy of the gaming world earned more than $360 million in North America and Britain. The game, a first-person shooter, took in $650 million in its first five days. Both sales marks are records for any form of entertainment. In comparison, the all-time opening-day record for a Hollywood film is $72.7 million for The Twilight Saga: New Moon . Black Ops recently passed the $1 billion mark, the Holy Grail for the gaming industry.

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)

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sponsored the passing of a ban on the sale of violent video games to minors in the state of California. This issue was brought to the Supreme Court, where the justices will decide whether it's constitutional to ban the sale of a creative medium of any kind ("Justices express strong views of ban on violent video games," Nov. 3). The answer is no. If California bans the sale of games and it is deemed constitutional, then any incentive that developers have to make these games is lost.

After all those championships and MVP awards, Michael Jordan has finally arrived - on the cover of a basketball video game. Jordan fronts NBA 2K11, a game that allows fans to add the five-time MVP to their favorite team. One of sports' top pitchmen during his playing days, Jordan had never appeared on the cover of an NBA-licensed basketball game. Now the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, the six-time champion with the Chicago Bulls said Thursday the deciding factor in doing it now was the opportunity "to connect to this generation, when in essence a lot of these young kids never saw me play.

We spend some time with the quarterback of the Green Raiders: Who is your favorite music artist? Wiz Khalifa. What's your favorite TV show? Probably "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. " I like it, because it's about Philadelphia and I think the guys on there are funny. It just fits with me. You have family members who have turned professional, right? My cousin, Matt, played in the NFL. People always think he's my uncle. I guess it's because of the age difference, but he's my cousin.

HIS STAGE name, Random, was no random choice for triple-threat hip-hop artist Raheem Jarbo. The Philadelphia native's inspiration was the X-Factor comic-book character who shape-shifts to meet the challenges that come his way. Jarbo certainly has a willingness and ability to adapt, whether he's teaching middle-school English or straddling the hip-hop and video-game music genres on stage, as a conscious underground MC and nerdcore superstar, and as...

Fox announced that it will use "video game-style coverage" during the baseball playoffs. According to Fox Sports president Eric Shanks, cameras will "zip" over the field of play, providing "a video game view of baseball for the first time. "   Are either of you excited for the new camera work Fox is billing as "a television first"? Being the sober journalist that I am, I will reserve judgment until I see the result. But if it's anything like that giant, plodding  transformer-like figure in a helmet that's been featured on Fox Sports forever, I'm skeptical.

Adapted from a recent online discussion. Question: My sister and I are wondering about something, and I said we should try to get your take. Our brother and his wife (and their two kids) are not hurting financially. They both work, live in a more expensive area than we do, and send their kids to private school. Their son and my son are almost the same age and like to get together for their days off. My nephew was here for a long weekend, and they spent almost the whole day playing Wii. At dinner, my son said, "You should get one for your house.

TrackMania (Nintendo Wii) Dreamcatcher, Ubisoft $39.99 While Nintendo slipped into the driver's seat last year with its DS version, this popular mini-racer with a debut on the Wii keeps the pedal to the metal with a couple of extra features that might make it worth another spin around the block. Originally a 2006 PC game, TrackMania has remained very popular because of gravity-defying physics and seemingly limitless track editing. The Wii game ships with 200 tracks spread over six locales (rally, desert, snow, stadium, coast, and island)