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.