With teams like the Detroit Pistons and New Jersey Nets tearing it up in the playoffs, it’s time to comfort yourself with Midway’s “NBA Ballers.”

The best feature of this one-on-one street ball title, available in Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions, is the Rags to Riches tournament.

You create a player – height, weight, facial features – and send him to do battle on the home courts of NBA superstars.

The graphics in “NBA Ballers” ($39; suitable for all ages) are excellent, and the minimal number of players on the court means that the developers made each player look almost realistic.

The basic goal is to outscore your opponents, but you also want to embarrass your foe with crazy moves such as alley-oops off the backboard and dribbling through your opponents’ legs.

As in Electronic Arts’ NBA games, you use the second analog control stick to do trick moves, an intuitive way to play.

There are all sorts of cool parts in the games. If you’re standing under the hoop and jump to block a shot or do a layup, you’ll bang your head on the metal. Or on defense, you can grab an offensive player and hurl him across the court.

Sometimes the ball will come loose, and you can grab it and swoop in for an easy dunk.

Other times, your opponent will hang on to the ball and land closer to the hoop, giving him an easy basket. So there are no cheap moves.

Pulling off crazy dunks and dribbles earns you extra cash, which you can spend on unlocking new moves, purchasing fancy cars, houses, clothes, jewelry and even acquiring a posse.

This last feature is a little hard to understand. As if the league didn’t have enough image problems with players and women, it’s now officially licensing a game that lets you buy groupies.

Granted, none of the actual NBA players in “Ballers” – including Kobe Bryant – can acquire a posse, only your fictitious, created player. But it is a little weird.

Otherwise, “Ballers” is a fun, exciting game with excellent game play.

The Xbox version, which I tested, doesn’t support Xbox Live, but the PS2 version does have online play.

If you find yourself stupefied by the primitive style of basketball being played in the playoffs right now, “NBA Ballers” will renew your faith in the game.

Dreamcast 2, anyone?

Sega sent out a notice that it is planning an “Explosive Announcement Event” at the Electronic Entertainment Expo this week in Los Angeles.

It promises that the news will surprise everyone. Hyperbole is the coin of the video game realm, but you have to wonder if Sega is planning a return to the video game hardware market. If so, don’t bet on a new console.

Home systems are too expensive to design, market and support for a company of Sega’s diminished size, and all the factors that forced the firm to kill the beloved Dreamcast are still in place.

A new handheld system is a possibility, and Sega has the panache to create a video game version of Apple’s iPod. But Nintendo owns the handheld market right now, and Sony is dumping buckets of cash on its new PSP handheld, so Sega might have a tough time.

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AP-NY-05-11-04 1401EDT