Star Wars Monopoly CD-ROM: Review

...DO NOT COLLECT 200 CREDITS

(Unless you survive the AI opponents of Star Wars Monopoly on your computer!)

All right, I'll admit it. When I first saw the Star Wars Monopoly game in the local Target, there wasn't any question. I'd never played Monopoly before in my life, I only had the vaguest idea of what went on in the course of an average game, and it had been years since I'd even looked at something other than a role-playing game. That didn't matter. I just had to have it.

It was pretty much the same situation when I first saw the Multimedia Star Wars Monopoly. No question, no fuss; I just bought it. I'd grown so fond of the boardgame version of it that I couldn't summon up any sort of argument to talk myself out of spending more money. And much like my purchase of the boardgame, I haven't regretted one bit.

I will admit, however, that I'd had the first shred of misgivings when looking through the instruction booklet that came with the CD-ROM, as it mentioned that it ran optimumally on a Pentium 90, a couple degrees higher than the 486 dx100 that my budget currently allows me. But upon installation, I found it to run with nary a hitch. Admittedly, there were points when it would hang for a couple of brief seconds, but these weren't enough to bother me in the least. All in all, I was pleased.

TAKING BACK THE GALAXY...
The premise is pretty straightforward. It's Monopoly, with all of the tokens and locations redone according to the Star Wars galaxy, just like the boardgame that Parker Brothers put out. Some rules (which, due to my unfamiliarity with the original rules, don't change much) have been added from the classic version, and the cards that come with the game include such things as "You are elected Grand Moff" and "Take a ride in a TIE Fighter," reflecting the flavor of the movies.

The game starts out with a command room wherein one picks the figures for the game (nicely rendered to look like pewter -- just like the ones Parker Brothers put out) and listens to C-3P0 (voiced by the one and only Anthony Daniels!) critiquing your choice. Once the figures have been chosen and named accoring to the player, the game begins.

The board is suspended in space, canted at an angle to get a better three dimensional representation, with the players taking up positions on each side. And when it comes around to rolling the dice (positioned on a platform in the center of the spaceborne gameboard), the distinctive ship of the character you're playing comes up and hovers, waiting for you to roll. Darth Vader has his TIE x1, Han has the Falcon, Leia the Blockade Runner, and so on. From here, game play proceeds as normal. At least, it does on a 486 dx100 with 16 Meg of RAM, with only the random comments from C-3P0.

A rather neat feature of the game is that it configures the settings according to the hardware profile that it detects upon installation, adding more bells and whistles when it thinks the system can handle the added features. This was somethingt that I found out upon playing the game on a friend's computer.

Playing .avi files
Why its better to own a carbon freeze
chamber than to be in one.

See, the game rather smoothly on my computer, given the limited resources it has to work with. The friend of mine, on the other hand, is running a Pentium II 233, with a fairly snappy amount of RAM and a decent video card. For this vista, the game pulled out the deluxe settings. On his computer, every move brought up a brief movie related to the property (a Dagobah property will bring up scenes from Empire that pertain, landing on a Hoth property shows Hoth scenes) from the selection that is available on the CD, along with showing an animation of the character moving from space to space.

This can, however, get a little old. The first few times around the board, it's pretty neat, especially with the shrugging Stormtrooper and Han skidding across the board, but with repetition, it becomes tiresome, especially with the time that it takes to load up each and every AVI file and play it. I had known my system was a little bit slow to be handling this kind of cutting edge software, but when a Pentium II 233 starts being unable to do video refreshes, you know there's something wrong. Luckily, there's a feature that lets you cut back the performance rating that the game is running at, getting rid of the constant movies and all the animation. It makes the game less fancy, but all the quicker to play through. (And the other drawback to all the movies is that, while there are a lot of scenes to draw from with most of the properties, the Coruscant properties have all of one sequence each, apparently.)

...ONE PROPERTY AT A TIME
Still and all, it's an excellent game, something that I'm rather happy with having. Aside from the game overestimating system requirements here and there, it's a flawless adaptation of the boardgame, with all the added paraphenalia that one would expect of Star Wars multimedia. I, for one, have spent far too many hours playing with it while I could be doing something a little more productive. But then, I guess that's a pretty good recommendation for a game, isn't it?

The game comes fully equipped with Internet playability, a feature that I can see becoming horribly addicting, but that's something that I've been holding off on thus far. Because, while I know that I can beat a Medium difficulty Luke and an Easy difficulty Leia without much fuss, I have the feeling that I'd be so much Bantha Poodoo against anybody else.

(Reuben Beattie looks up briefly from his game of Monopoly, waving vaguely as
he curses the Medium difficulty Luke and the Difficult Boba Fett.)