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If you’re a rabidly hungry college basketball fan, EA Sports’ NCAA March Madness 07 is more effective than Phentermine at killing all appetite for a game that simulates it. Not in a good way, either.

You see, March Madness 07 is submitted as evidence that EA Sports just doesn’t give a damn about their basketball titles anymore. At least not enough to make them play well.

What’s wrong? Just about everything. The game allows you to start a college coaching career as a rookie coach taking over ANY program in the country, even Duke. Does that remotely make sense?

Once you take over a program, the recruiting feature is severely broken because of all the limitations for how you can sort recruits. The defensive aspect of the game is lacking and the two-button shooting system is archaic compared to 2K Sports’ system of choosing between button-shooting or right-analog stick shooting.

I could go on forever about how many ways this game is poorly conceived, but let’s leave it at this: stay away from this game and get 2K Sports’ College Hoops 2K7 or even Wolverine Studio’s Total College Basketball for PC. The latter may not be much for graphics, as a PC text-based sports management sim, but it’s a lot more engaging in nearly every other way than EA Sports’ latest hoops embarrassment.

Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemnia is one of the smuttiest RPGs on the market today, despite never saying one bad word or even showing a female character in anything skimpier than a rather modest swimsuit.

How did the game pull this off? By the same sort of language substitution that Gore Vidal once made famous. Vidal’s point was to prove that “dirty words” referring to sexual organs were not inherently dirty; it was how they were used in context that made them stimulating.

NIS America’s point is a bit less clear. The game casts a female-only race into a subservient role in a society that they once conquered but no longer rule. As such, they all have heavily-damaged egos and are mostly victimized by human males, used as tools and then tossed aside. You see, they wield powerful magic but can only release it in the form of songs brought out by the human males who “mind-dive” with them.

Mind-diving, and later on, “inserting,” (in this case, inserting means to install a crystal into a reyvatiel that boosts her power) become thinly-veiled references to intimacy and sex. Aside from this allegorical element, the game is quite clean, prim and proper. There are no sex scenes, no nekkid stuff, nothing that would trigger an M-mature rating from the ESRB.

And yet, in nearly every scene between the game’s hero, Lyner, and the two main Reyvatiels in his life, the innuendo is so think you could use it as insulation to keep your house warm in the winter.

Ar Tonelico looks like a harmless game with a lot of female characters in it, most of whom appear innocent enough to do little that is more risque than spending time in front of makeup mirrors, but that’s not the case. While there’s little that is smutty, Ar Tonelico is a genuine education in intimacy in general, and sexual relationships, with all their complexity and complications, specifically.

Consider carefully before letting your preteens near the game. The end-result message is a responsible one - treating women with respect, practicing caution before becoming intimate, and so forth; but the subject matter, however veiled, is quite mature.

While the audience for PC-based sports management sims isn’t as huge as the audience for, let’s say, NBA 2K7, the arrival of the latest offering by Wolverine Studios’ Gary Gorski is cause for celebration among fans of this genre of sports game.

For years, Gorski’s games have been the subject of much anticipation; he has revitalized and revived interest in statistically-accurate text-based sports sims with previous releases, and Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball is a significant refinement over his previous version, Grey Dog Software’s Total Pro Basketball 2005.

What is most impressive is the small company’s ability to respond quickly to reported bugs and glitches with timely patches. In the 10 days or so since the game’s official release, Gorski has released three “public beta” patches as well as one official “v1.1″ patch, and the process is still ongoing.

While some folks may find DDS:PB a bit retro since it’s not a console-style sports game, the depth of DDS:PB is without parallel. Plus, he has a college hoops title, Total College Basketball, that integrates seamlessly with the pro game.

Sadly, sales of Wolverine Studio’s titles is still minuscule compared to that of EA Sports. They count their sales volume in the thousands, not the 100s of thousands.

Help keep independent studios like Wolverine Studios thriving! Hop over there now and try out the three-day trial copy of all his titles, and buy the ones you like. It’s not like they’re gonna be jetting off to Orlando vacations on the modest $25-$35 fees they charge for their games… and the patch-jobs are free!

The folks who made Dark Cloud, Dark Cloud 2: Electric Boogaloo and Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King have released their latest - and last - PS2 masterpiece. Developer Level-5’s Rogue Galaxy is being billed as the last great PS2 RPG, and it lives up to that billing.

While the game isn’t a next-gen, open world masterpiece like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, that allowed you to do everything from becoming a vampire to taking up a job doing presentation folder printing, Rogue Galaxy does its best to offer a game that pushes the boundaries of previous-gen gaming.

The graphics and soundwork are solid, the game is over 100 hours long, and the writing is witty and light-hearted without losing an element of heart. Anyone who has owned the PS2 and loved it for its wealth of RPGs need to get this one. It’s a great capper to a great run on a great platform.

I just hope PS3 will do as well. Level-5 is working on their first PS3 title, White Knight Story, though… so the signs are promising!