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Every so often talented programmers sit down and decide they're going to create a piece of software that's really different. 999 times out of 1,000 the results are disappointing. This program isn't the odd one out.

The idea is that, as sheriff of Gold Gulch you have to maintain order through a series of 'conversations' with different members of the town's population. Depending on how you hangle the chit-chat you may find some of the characters pull a gun on you, in which case you have to respond with a lightning draw and blow the guy (or gal) off the street.

The encounters are depicted on attractively drawn (but motionless) backgrounds. All that moves are the characters you meet and your own right hand and gun, looming large at the left of the picture. The convesation is revealed in five lines of text at the bottom of the screen. The first line reports the words of the townsperson. The next four indicate your possible responses, with the one you select helping dictate how the conversation continues.

This multiple-choice approach means the game can be entirely joystick controlled. The trouble is it doesn't leave much room for skill. Much of the time, you don't really have any reason other than idle curiosity to choose one response over another. And after playing the game a few times you're likely to have exhausted the potential of many of the conversations.

That leaves the shooting which, apart from having a nicely animated hand to look at, is also pretty uninteresting. A joystick movement brings the gun out of the holster and miraculously implants a crosshair cursor on the screen. You aim and fire, so the only point of entertainment is trying to predict when someone's about to draw on you and keeping your reaction time short.

There is quite a nice touch though, when you yourself get shot. The screen goes dark and all you see are bits of text reporting the conversation of other people saying things like "Bring a doctor!"

Another big bore is that at the end of each conversation a new backdrop has to be loaded into memory. On the cassette version at any rate, this means having to wait for about a minute every other minute. Hardly conducive to getting any momentum or excitement going.

If you can avoid a fatal shooting and make it all the way through the tape to sundown, you get a screen which gives you a rating on seven different points including: how well you maintained your authority, the number of crooks you captured, how well you did romantically, the number of bad guys you shot, the number of good guys you shot, etc. This gives you a minor incentive to try again, but only minor.

The game lacks gameplay. Original, yes, absorbing, no.