Strip away the marketing hype. If you want to know what kinds of people video game console makers are targeting, take a look at the kinds of games they play.

Let's see . . . The big games for GameCube are "Luigi's Mansion," "Super Smash Bros. Melee," "Animal Forest," and "Pikmin." You hear a lot about "Bio Hazard" and first-person perspective shooters coming to the console, but I get the feeling that Nintendo treasures its young audience.

PlayStation2 plays everything, including a smattering of kiddie games. Wrestling, driving, adventures, first-person perspective mosquito flight simulations, role-playing games . . .

When the folks at Sony Computer Entertainment say they want to take over the home, you get the feeling that they mean the entire home.

And then there is Microsoft. Of the 50-plus games I have seen for the Xbox, at least 20 have been sports simulations of one type or another. There are three American-style football games, three hockey games, three baseball games, a boxing game, two NASCAR racing games, two surfing games, and more.

Not all of these games are from Microsoft, of course. A great many of them come from Electronic Arts and Sega. But the point is that both Microsoft and its third-party publishing partners see sports as a key genre on the Xbox.

It's no surprise that Electronic Arts, possibly America's most polished publisher, has taken its popular sports franchises to Xbox, considering Microsoft's stated intention about going after the over-20 crowd.

The surprise is how well Microsoft has done with its sports games.

At the U.S. launch for the Xbox, Microsoft released an American-style football game called "NFL Fever." Frankly, that was the best football game of last year -- not that it is likely to do well in Japan.

More recently, Microsoft released "NBA Inside Drive 2002," a surprisingly good basketball game for Xbox. It's funny when you think about it. Of all of America's big sports, basketball is the "cool" one. It involves more finesse than football, has a lot more action than baseball, and has a certain street appeal.

Yet here is Microsoft, the world's biggest gathering of geeks, and it comes out with its first basketball title -- and the game has legs.

Let's begin by giving those little Xbox devils at Microsoft their due -- Xbox does graphics like nobody's business. PlayStation2 and GameCube are coming along. They're certainly more powerful than PlayStation and Nintendo 64 -- the consoles they replaced.

But the players in "Inside Drive" are easily the best-looking virtual athletes in any team sport simulation on the market. The basketball players in "Inside Drive" have full 3-D models of real basketball stars. And there's none of this flat-face stuff where artists use facial textures to save on polygons -- each player has a fully sculpted face.

They also have muscles. Again, we are not talking about flat textures that look like muscles; the sinew on these bodies bulges.

That's the good news. The bad news is that these guys are all body and no mind.

"Inside Drive" is easy to pick up and easy to play, but the virtual athletes on the court are all half-brained imbeciles. Part of the appeal of basketball is that it is a sport in which players must constantly hustle.

That is not the case with the "Inside Drive" version of the sport. I've seen better hustle from the Pro Bowlers' Association. This game has centers and guards that stand around watching like control tower operators as opponents jump and dunk the ball. You'll be treated to teammates who run to the basket and watch as defenders swarm you and steal the ball.

Still, Microsoft started from scratch when it comes to basketball, and "Inside Drive" is a game in which the shooting, passing, blocking shots, and stealing are intuitive. That's impressive.

"Inside Drive" is not the best game in basketball -- that honor goes to "NBA 2K2," a game published by Sega of America's Sega Sports line. But "Inside Drive" is the best-looking game in the league.

And now that Microsoft has come out to play, look for more polish in the future.

Clearly Microsoft has older, male-dominated audiences in its sights. For that crowd, Xbox may turn out to be a winner.