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The Atari brand has just decided to do the smartest thing with their Dungeons and Dragons license since Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 were announced. Coming this spring, exclusively to Sony’s PSP handheld platform, is Dungeons and Dragons Tactics, which is promised to conform to all the latest edition 3.5 rules.

While Square-Enix, Namco, Atlus, NIS America and others have made RPGs a mainstream form of entertainment, for some reason mentioning Dungeons and Dragons is still equated with dice-toting nerds who knock down mailboxes with baseball bats, pretending they are dragons. It’s a logical disconnect that, frankly, baffles me.

But hopefully what Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 have done for restoring the dignity of the name brand on PC, Dungeons and Dragons Tactics will do for the brand on PSP. If it retains the core genre game play and appeal that has made titles like Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea and others big hits, but adds in the D&D flavor, this spring should be a rewarding one for PSP owners.

One of my biggest disappointments in 2006 was that my PC was almost too puny to run Neverwinter Nights 2. I’m a big fan of the first one and whether I’m living in northwestern Wisconsin, the Twin Cities of Minnesota or looking into Apex NC real estate, I’ve loved the original Neverwinter Nights since it was first introduced.

In fact, the first game was the reason I bought my current PC; the one I had owned before that was simply too wimpy to run Neverwinter Nights properly. Now, the PC that I bought to run Neverwinter Nights is now on that same edge of being not quite powerful enough to run Neverwinter Nights 2 without a lot of chug-chug-chug and choppy framerates.

I need a new PC. An Athlon 64 dual core would do nicely. *sigh*

It’s been a long time coming, but from what I hear on the indy PC gaming circuit, developer Gary Gorski of Wolverine Studios should soon be unveiling his newest pro basketball sports management sim.

The game, Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball, runs on Windows PCs and will be one of the most statistically accurate sports sims on the market, when it’s released.

How do I know this? Because Gorski is the guy who made the last title to hold that honor, Total Pro Basketball. While the game lacks the flash-n-dazzle of EA Sports’ NBA Live 2007 or 2K Sports’ NBA 2K7, what the game does well - better than anyone else, really - is keep the results of simmed games believable. Gorski takes every conceivable stat and game dynamic, stacks them up in a virtual truck rack, and drives them into the sunset of a polished, finished game.

Gary’s company, Wolverine Studios, is hoping to release the game sometime soon. It could be January, it could be later. But whenever it’s released, you have to know it’s gonna rob a lot of hours from sports management freaks like me.

One of the coolest things going on the PlayStation 3’s PlayStation Store right now and for the last three weeks or so is the limited-time offer to download Gran Turismo HD Concept for free. Sure, the game is limited right now to about a dozen cars and only one track, but as a “play it now” glimpse into one of Sony’s most-cherished racing franchises and what the PS3 could hold for fans of the game, Gran Turismo HD Concept is an addicting teaser.

Now, it’s not a completely original-for-PS3 build. The game is based on Gran Turismo 4, with an extensive port-up makeover for PS3. And early rumors had it that you’d have to buy 100s of extra cars and dozens of extra tracks to race on via PlayStation Store “microtransactions.” Otherwise known as literally “nickle-and-diming you to death.”

The prospect had some people with dollar signs in their eyes scheming to find ways to make similar micro-transaction schemes involving everything from unofficial game mods to business card printing. Yikes!

So far, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The game is limited, seems to be little more than a tech demo, but is addictive fun for all of that. And it’s free. That’s nice. Now, back to our regularly scheduled time trial.

My wife is a big Sudoku fan. Loves the stuff. I’ve never much cared for it. But today we downloaded the demo of Go! Sudoku from the PlayStation Store and darned if the game didn’t hook me, too.

The free “starter pack” offers up four matrices each of four different difficulty levels. I let my wife try it out, because I want thinking Sudoku was about as fun as writing out a bunch of return address labels. My wife was skeptical she’d like it because she prefers to work things out on paper when she does Sudoku.

But soon she was having a decent amount of fun and when I tried it later on, it hooked me, too. We checked into the PlayStation Store again and there are four booster packs available for $2.99 each. I was hoping each pack would offer maybe 50 extra puzzles at that price.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first booster pack weighs in at well over 500 “easy” level matrices, and by the time you buy all four booster packs at $2.99 each, you have over 1,400 matrices in all.

Some folks have been skeptical the PlayStation 3’s PlayStation Store can succeed. But with low-cost, high-entertainment stuff like this available, I think once they work out the kinks (like no background downloading), PS3 and their online store could give Xbox Live some competition this time out in the world of online gaming.

Despite boasting up to what some estimate to be 500 hours of game playing time to complete, the makers of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have decided it’s not enough… thank goodness! 2K Games and Bethesda Softworks today finally made the official announcement that they will release, this spring, the first full-fledged and official expansion to the game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles.

The expansion will open up a new area on the map to explore, offering a 40+ hour main quest and possibly at least another 100 or more hours of total gaming time. There were also new screens released from the expansion.

While adding content to this ground-breaking RPG may not make the list of anyone’s ideal first communion gifts, for series fans, it’s pretty spiffy.

I’m happy to say I was part of the decision-making in naming 2K Games and Bethesda Softworks’ Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as DigNews.com’s first-ever Game of the Year winner. Our site’s never named a game of the year before, and there’s no guarantee we will again, but Oblivion is a game that’s made a huge next-gen impact.

There’s a lot of freedom in the game to do whatever you want to, from farming to setting up a retail business to - probably - printing up professional business cards for your fellow adventurers. Well, maybe not quite, but you get the idea.

It’s a game that has turned a lot of people who don’t normally play videogames into addicts. That’s rare, and that’s why we game this first-of-its-kind honor to the game. What fun!

The next-gen - now current-gen - console war has arrived and, already, the game has gotten dirty. For weeks before I acquired my PlayStation 3, I kept hearing a persistent rumor: when you get your PS3, don’t get rid of your PS2 right away if you want to play Final Fantasy XII - there’s a bug in backward compatibility and the game looks like crap on PS3.

The rumor had the desired effect, I guess. I hesitated to use my PS2 for trade credit toward a PS3. When I finally brought my PS3 home, however, being the natural skeptic that I am, I immediately popped in FFXII to see how bad it was.

Hear this now: the rumor is complete crap! After popping in the disk and playing a couple hours into the game, I can tell you that, if anything, FFXII looks better on PS3 than it did on PS2. Now, of course, if you have a PS3 connected to an HDTV and your HDTV utilizes only a 32Hz HDMI cable, then your results might be disappointing. But for most people, FFXII looks spectacular on PS2 or PS3. Don’t believe the anti-PS3 hype!

You know, Sony’s not perfect. Far from it. The PS3 launch was basically the PS2 launch on a weight loss program. Few of the launch titles are all that good. No one likes that the SixAxis controller doesn’t vibrate. The price of the system isn’t reasonable for the market no matter how you look at it. And Untold Legends just sucks.

Don’t folks think Sony has enough negatives going against it without piling on false crap? I mean, you have to buy a $15 card reader to transfer your game saves that you’ll only use once; there are some minor bugs on about 200 backward-compatible titles (which is a darn sight better than Xbox 360 not having backward compatibility at all for a majority of original Xbox titles); and you lose all your peripherals from the previous gen, meaning everything from your Karaoke Revolution microphone and dance pad to your $200 Gran Turismo 4 steering wheel are useless.

Is it really necessary to create lies on top of all that’s true?

Lots of people like to call videogame content ratings censorship, but no one’s preventing games with any type of content from being published. They all see the light of day. Under real censorship, they never would.

No, what ESRB ratings are is a guide as to what type of content to expect from a videogame. It’s meant as an aid to parents, and it’s no different than a movie rating from the MPAA. I mean, it’s not like, to buy an M-rated game, you’re require to submit to a DNA test for immigration, or anything. All ESRB ratings want to do is prevent kids 17 and under from getting hold of adult content games, just as there is a desire to keep them away from R-rated movies or access to pornographic magazines.

A lot of ivory-tower idealists will argue that kids can make their own choice, especially at 17, but most parents of teens know better. In teen years, kids only think they know it all. Of course, even some adults - especially liberals - think that of themselves long before they actually are mature. But since maturity is an individual process, and we all age at the same rate, guess what has to be the measure? That’s right, age.

Is 18 a magic number? No. Considering the behavior of most of the kids I went to college with, it should probably be more like 21, or 25. But the line has to be drawn somewhere, and since 18 is the age at which one can enlist in the armed services and go off to a foreign country to fight and die, I guess allowing them access to a little Grand Theft Auto and Hustler isn’t the worst thing in the world.

If you’re wondering what to give a gamer who already has every platform known to exist, there’s a simple answer. Where are the gonna sit while playing their PS3, 360, Wii, DS, PSP, and PC, not to mention their cell phone games and previous-gen consoles?

The answer, of course, lies in the kids furniture department of your local furniture or department store. One of my personal favorites is a spendy one that came out a couple years ago; it was PS2-compatible and offered leather-covered reclining comfort with beverage and magazine holders, as well as side-speakers and built-in Dual Shock 2 rumble functions.

Can you imagine playing Shadow of the Colossus in a contraption like that? It would add a far more engaging dimension than a simple vibrating controller. Each step a colossus took would be epic. Someday…

I’m a big fan of sports management sims and for many years now, my top title in that genre has been Solecismic Software’s Front Office Football and Front Office Football: The College Years. But I’ve found a new favorite.

Wolverine Studios, home to Gary Gorski, has a pair of titles that are genuinely addictive. Total College Basketball, despite the lack of an official NCAA license, puts a real flame to the feet of 2K Sports’ College Hoops 2K7, in terms of the depth of its coaching career mode and its sim features. Sure, it’s a 2D sim and lacks the 3D flash of College Hoops, but when it comes to sports management game play, this is the title that is the Coaster Furniture of the videogame world. Just as Coaster delivers small, practical, compact furniture solutions at a reasonable price, so does Wolverine deliver small, practical, company sports management sims on PC at a reasonable price.

Then there’s the soon-to-be-released update of Total Pro Basketball 2005… it’s gonna be called Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball. It has a load of new features that weren’t in TPB, and is to pro basketball what TCB is to college sports sims.

Hey, Gorski even put out Total Pro Golf, which strips out the 3D stuff and offers a career mode that’s just as fascinating as anything found in Tiger Woods PGA games. Sure, it’s a bit retro, but it’s fun and plays way faster than Tiger Woods PGA. I still have gridiron appreciation for Solecismic, but Wolverine Studios is a new name to watch for fans of this genre.

It’s nothing new to talk about, but I’m still not happy about Sony’s decision to make PlayStation 3 so expensive. It reeks of the arrogance that comes from winning two successive generations of home videogame console hardware wars. It’s the same sort of dynamic that Nintendo faced coming off the success of SNES, when they bucked the trend of CD-based gaming and belligerently released a cart-based Nintendo 64 system.

We all know how that turned out and Nintendo really has yet to recover. Could the same fate be in store for Sony, or does Ken Kutaragi and company have a few more tricks packed away in their emergency kits?

We’ve all heard the propaganda. PS3 delivers more technology in one box than the other two consoles combined. Granted. Fine. But you can just about buy both an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii for the cost of a 60MB HD PS3.

The folks Sony are not thinking about are the mainstream audience. The ones who make sure that a videogame console isn’t just a 20 million unit niche product over five years, but a 70 million unit, top-selling cultural phenomenon like PSone and PS2 were.

Right now, the budget gamer is looking hard at Nintendo Wii despite the outdated graphics, and the general gamer who’s not well-off is appreciating the Xbox 360 more and more every day.

Sony won two console generations by insisting it’s not about graphics superiority, it’s not about technological superiority, it’s about games… and then delivering on that. But aside from some games that probably won’t see US release until 2008 at the earliest, like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy XIII, the technological edge that PS3 holds over 360 is looking less and less attractive as the 360 seems like the common sense middle-ground for most gamers.

One has to remember, also, that the PSone and PS2 won their wars priced right about where their competition was priced. Introducing dramatic differences in console price, this generation, could change the whole dynamic of who ultimately wins.