Five years ago, I'd have to agree that the price for the license would be on par with most everything else. But now that Disney owns Star Wars, all bets are off. I'm sure that license has skyrocketed.

I played it at CAX. It was amazingly easy. Kinda got bored after a bit, honestly. I know it's just a Pro, but it still felt kinda cheap. If it were my company, all the levels of machines would play exactly the same way and have the same playfield shots, ramps, and features. The Premium and LE lines would just have added bling to the outside of the machine, that's it. You know the vast majority of Premiums and LEs are going into homes anyway so why punish the operators with a Pro that is missing gameplay items?

What's interesting(to me anyway) is that later on in the day, I went and played a No Fear. I had never played a NF, but I heard it was also a Ritchie design. Umm, yeah, SW is pretty much the mirror of NF. Now I totally understand why people complain about many of Lawlor's designs all being basically the same game and how they don't like it. They're just not Lawlor fans. If SW and NF are typical Ritchie designs, I guess I'm just not a Ritchie fan. Not saying that other people aren't or shouldn't love SW, its just not my style. It truly is: to each their own.

Edit: Further proving that I failed Pinball History 101, I actually am a bit of a Ritchie fan. I love BK, F14, and STTNG.

I was able to hit a number of things fairly well. It wasn't a drain monster, which is nice. But without too much effort, I played one game for about ten minutes and put up just under 500mil points. Got my name in there in a few different places for certain mode champions, too.

It's really not a bad game. In a home collection, you could sit there and play it for a couple hours to rack up a great score, but it's extremely repetitive.

The game is simple. The game is fun. But I think the problem so many are having with it is that it could've been so much more. The DI comparison comes in because it shows how a theme can be fully immersed into a game. DI is a "nothing" theme. By that I mean that nobody knows it, it has no cachet, it has no history in pop culture. But, hey, the game kicks ass and nobody can complain about the lack of features on it. Everything from the light show to the LCD animations are all top notch.

Then Stern comes out with what is probably the third or fourth most recognized IP on the planet and to a lot of us, it's a swing and a miss. Where is the Force in this game? How do you not put magnets in the playfield somewhere that you can control with the flipper buttons or even the "action" button? Mistake #1, if you ask me. Make it an outlane ball save feature a la BK, that's a Ritchie thing, that would've been easy and a nice call-back. If these kind of features exist only exist on the Premium and/or LE, then Stern needs to make sure that at any show where the game is available to play, there needs to be one of each because the Pro just ain't cuttin' it. Honestly, the Pro felt like the BDK they sold at Costco.

I don't know about where you live, but in my city, the EXACT same thing can be said about the housing market over the past 4 years. Prices are now as high or higher than before the crash of '08-'09. Inflation doesn't move that quickly, we're headed for another crash.

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SW shoots really well, especially compare to GB. GB is great to look at but, man, that game is tough. Every time I've played it, it's been a drain monster, too. I need more time on it, I guess.