Alright cowpokes, hitch up yer belts and strap on them six-shooters. We got us some bank robbers to nab.

That's the premise behind the new OS/2 arcade style game, $Sheriff. You are the sheriff, entrusted to protect the local bank from would be robbers aiming to put an early end to your sheriffing. The game is a simple shoot 'em up with an even simpler interface.

The Controls

As I mentioned, you are firing a standard western-movie issue peacemaker. That means regular reloading. Luckily reloading doesn't take as long in $Sheriff as it does in real life or these hoodlums would fill you full of holes. But reloading does cost you. Each time you reload $251 is deducted from the money you have "recovered" from the robbers (and you thought you were in this just for the sake of the law). If you reload too often, you quickly get low on cash, but this is more of a "score" issue than a safety one. Even trying, I was unable to run out of bullets. This is because you can not fire unless there is a person in a doorway.

During each game you have three "lives". Get shot or shoot someone who doesn't deserve it and you lose one "life". Your score, the number of lives left, number of bullets in your gun and some neat propaganda are all displayed across the bottom of the screen.

Playability

When starting $Sheriff, you have a choice of "Hard", "Normal" or "Too Easy". These selections only change the speed of your enemies' responses, but I'll warn you now, it's plenty difficult past the first level even on "Too Easy". Start out slow or you'll be eatin' lead quite a bit.

The targets appear in the various doors according to a set pattern so after you play the game many times you'll start to anticipate bank robbers' appearances. However, this pattern can be modified (instructions are not given but if players are interested, the author instructs them to contact him).

You may be surprised how fun a game that only has one screen and four buttons to push can be. It's quite enjoyable. This is partly due to the hand-eye coordination required, partly the satisfaction of being a western hero but mostly due the really cool sounds.

Sound Effects

The real joy for me though is what I assume are sound bites digitized from Clint Eastwood's, The Unforgiven. When you shoot one of the innocent folks you hear a raspy (pardon my French), "Ohhh shit." When you lose all three of your lives, Clint philosophizes, "A man's got to know his limitations." Also, both times, a dithered picture (GIF, 26k) that looks like it came from that movie's propaganda is displayed. The final touch is a brief funeral dirge played on an organ to get you in the mood.

Shortcomings

• You should be able to shoot randomly into doorways even if there is no person standing in that doorway. Then you would have to be more careful or risk running out of bullets.

• The game could use better graphics. The characters are cartoonish and while they are fine, digitized pictures of "authentic" western scenery (or better yet, cheesy "B" grade movie sets) and pictures of Clint himself might be more fun.

• As I said above, you can modify the pattern of targets' appearance but making them random would be more challenging.

• The game is very light on instructions. These basically consist of one sketchy readme.txt file. But with a game this simple, no more explanation is really needed.

• The way the game keeps track of your money, it should have some sort of high score feature to keep track of your great stints of law and order keeping. I could find no such feature.

Conclusion

$Sheriff v0.12b

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