When you're a native of Atlantic City, there's not a hell of a lot to brag about. You barely start rattling off the list of My-Dad's-Better-than-Your-Dads before you're forced to resort to the gallows braggadoccio of the self-conscious nihilist: former port of call of the Trump Princess, home to celebrated acts of animal cruelty, muse for one of Bruce Springsteen's worst songs, polity of last resort for what must be a record number of arrested mayors, hometown of famous dead anchorwoman Jessica Savitch ... that kind of thing.

But there's always been one medal that all residents of South Jersey's favored strand can wear with pride. Alone among the great and small cities of the world, Atlantic City - its streets, its vacant lots, even its utilities and defunct transit lines - lives on into eternity, in every nation and language, through the most popular board game in the entire history of the galaxy.

It certainly isn't for lack of trying. With a booming John Williams score and clips from the movies, the game attempts to combine two great franchises into "an extraordinary intergalactic gaming experience." The static game pieces and four-color board have been replaced with animated characters and sets. Instead of the tiresome play-by-play of your uncle the banker, you get the toffish C-3PO announcing "Oh, someone's gone bankrupt. How unfortunate!"

Of course, that's merely a variation on a concept already pioneered in simpleton's theme casino issue:

But the failure of this project won't be due to the fact that staring at a monitor is considerably less fun than rolling dice and throwing around handfuls of play money. Nor is it a delayed reaction to that sinking feeling you got last year, when you saw the digitally remastered Star Wars trilogy and realized just how bad it really was. It's a simple matter of not knowing when to quit licensing.

You always knew it would happen. It used to be that only a sporting event could resist the cross-marketing juggernaut - because at some level, two teams had to play each other, and one had to win, regardless of what the market would bear. That has pretty much been overcome - Shaq was as ubiquitous as God in his universe before playing his first pro game. The only thing that can stop a licensing agreement now is rank incompatibility.

And in the melding of the Star Wars nursery and Monopoly's realtor covetousness, rank incompatibility is exactly what we have. If you're a true believer in the Campbellian dippiness of the Star Wars mythos, you may even find something vaguely sacrilegious in the notion of seeing Hoth and Tatooine overrun by real estate agents talking up the serene location to gullible young couples. Hasbro tries hard to give a Lucas shimmer to the mundane mechanics of the game (instead of houses and hotels, you build X-Wings and TIE fighters), but I can't escape this image of Darth Vader striding through an unfurnished two bedroom, making sweeping hand gestures at the amenities: "As you can see, there is ample closet space." With all the sound and music effects available on a CD-ROM, it's actually disappointing that the game makers didn't throw in a few of those glitches that crop up in any real estate deal - perhaps a sound file of James Earl Jones' booming bass berating his secretary on an emergency cell phone call: "I have the buyers here right now; what is the combination of the Hide-a-key?"

In the irreconcilable ends of these venerable franchises, we may even see the last, obese, flatulent gasp of McWorld, with its maze of synergies. But on the possibility that licensing may still have some life left in it, we offer up a few tie-in ideas of our own: