Sheriff is an anomaly; a classic era arcade game that will multiplicatively reward you for incredibly long play sessions instead of trying to boot you out immediately so that it can gobble more quarters. It's incredibly ambitious for its time, taking the simple vertical shooter concept and changing it to the player being surrounded, using a whole range of movement and eight-directional shooting to take out a bunch of bandits who are glad to charge through the openings in a player's defenses to get 'em. In theory, it's a significantly more stressful form of something like Space Invaders. In practice, you get a good rhythm shooting at a diagonal and sometimes move up or down. Your enemies react to rounds to determine their speed rather than to time, meaning that once you get a basic pattern going shooting the first enemy, you're basically set for the rest of the round. This is coupled with, as a reward for surviving ten rounds, your points being DOUBLED by Mr. Jack finally rescuing Betty and going through INSTANT MATRIMONY before she's immediately kidnapped again. This results in very long play times that are waaay too generous for a game made in the 70's - if I was, like, four and it was 1980 and I was surrounded by arcade machines for some reason, this would probably be my favorite.

'tis a fun little repetitive game. It has that Nintendo feel of "what if we did this thing a little bit different?" that games like CluClu Land, Devil World, Hell even stuff like Kid Icarus, Metroid, or Super Mario Kart would go on to hold, which is wild to see this early on in the company's history! But it is not an answer to Space Invaders, it's like, a polite and cheaper version from the weird supermarket down the street.