Star Wars Arcade

Star Wars Arcade brought to the 32X an arcade experience where you sat in a cockpit and shot at Imperial fighters. The game is an on-rails space shooter: the flight path is fixed, the player aims the reticle, dodges fire, and tries to shoot down everything that appears. The campaign runs through an attack on a Star Destroyer, a fight in a hangar, and finally into the famous Death Star trench, where you need to hit the exhaust port. Weapons have limited cooling and torpedoes must be conserved, so besides reflexes it also matters when you open fire and when you wait. Difficulty rises quickly, and the game doesn't shy away from throwing more targets onto the screen than you can swing your reticle across, so the outcome depends on priority — deal first with whatever is shooting at you.

On the 32X, the game runs in full polygons, which in 1994 was the main selling point on a home console. TIE fighters turn and pass you in space, explosions break apart into simple fragments, and the cockpit frames the image much like in the arcade cabinet. The graphics are textureless and blocky, but fast and clear. The sound relies on the series' iconic effects — the whine of lasers, the screech of fighter engines — and on musical themes that, even in simplified form, immediately set the right mood. There's also a two-player mode where one pilots and the other shoots, which makes playing together a surprisingly sociable affair.

At the time, it was one of the first titles to introduce the add-on to the public, and reviews swung between enthusiasm for the technology and reservations about how short the game is and how quickly it starts to repeat itself. Genre-wise, it continues the long tradition of on-rails Star Wars shooters and belongs among the bridges between sprite-based and polygonal eras. Today it's more of a half-hour attraction than a game for long evenings, but that half hour still has punch — especially the final trench run, which even in its blocky polygonal form nails exactly the scene most players remember the game for. With two players, it also works great as an evening's social attraction.