The extremely dapper Lexan Smythe-Worthington never let a close game get in the way of enjoying his space fizz. You're stranded up the proverbial creek but for once have actually been blessed with a paddle. There is an officially prescribed plot - you're a phenomenally unsuccessful intergalactic door-to-door salesman who has to overcome a gauntlet of eight Shufflepuck opponents to earn enough enough scratch to book your passage off-world - but the situation is fairly obvious. But somehow, the light dusting of Star Wars anthropological exotica elevates the whole enterprise, transforming a nuts-and-bolts sport sim into a story. With such crisp controls and the ability to convincingly dunt the puck toward your opponent at high speed, it would have been a rock-solid title, albeit one lacking much depth. The rest of the bunch are ambiguous enough to hint at something like the grand sweep of the Star Wars melting pot without teetering into actual breach of copyright: like Darth, but vaguer.Įven if you stripped out the Mos Eisley trappings, Shufflepuck Cafe would still be pretty good - an air hockey simulation where, at least on the Amiga, there was a wonderfully tangible connection between your fidgety on-screen paddle and the vintage A500 mouse. Perhaps the closest analogue is the porcine General - a crashing boar with a fondness for epaulettes, blessed with a wily playing style that encourages epithets - since he does have a more than a hint of Jabba's Gamorrean guards about him, and is also prominently positioned on the box art. Droids are allowed, for one thing, and while the rest of the patrons are a motley, often mottled bunch of gamblers, princesses and alien rogues, there is no exact correlation (Corellian or otherwise) with existing Star Wars characters. If there were any lawyers hovering over this particular intergalactic boozer, original developers Broderbund could point to various key differences between the Shufflepuck Cafe and Tattooine's most notorious space-jazz hangout. Galactic glaziers must have done well out of it. Smash hit: every single point scored in Shufflepuck Cafe was emphasised by the violent shattering of a protective pane. But to me, it's as evocative of Mos Eisley as a mint-condition Greedo action figure or poor Ponda Baba's severed arm. If there's a bright centre to the officially licensed universe, Shufflepuck Cafe would probably be on the planet that it's farthest from. What is weird, though, is that one of the games I most associate with Star Wars has no real connection to the franchise at all. Games have emphatically played their part, with dozens of beloved titles that have either simulated iconic moments from the films - with DICE's Battlefront resetting that particular bar extraordinarily high - or grafted their own dense mythologies onto the existing Lucas lore.
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Of course, this is a universe that has always been aggressively expanding in one way or another, through avalanches of merchandising both covetable and tacky, plus novels, comics and other ancillary spin-offs.
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The two-pronged assault of Star Wars Battlefront and The Force Awakens means that, willingly or not, we're all reliving memories of George Lucas' space saga: what it meant to us when we first experienced it, what it means to us now and what it might mean moving forward if Disney pursue their rather Imperial-sounding aim of putting out a new Star Wars movie every year until our planet goes the way of Alderaan. Right now, certain times seem not so long ago and certain galaxies not all that far, far away.
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