What if someone handed you a disc and told you it is a game created by a studio named Artdink that is a caveman simulator? You eat, evolve weapons, sleep, kill animals, and eventually die. Would you hand it back, or would your curiosity perk up enough to play it?
[img width=320 height=239]http://a.imageshack.us/img146/1530/tailofthesun1custom.jpg[/img]
Tail of the Sun is a fun little game involving a tribe of cave people (you start out with 2) on a singular quest: to create a stairway of mammoth skulls to reach the sun. It's a 3D polygonal PSX game from 1996, which will tell you all you need to know about the graphics. The 3D isn't a true 3D, at least not in the sense that you will have control over the viewpoint (camera): you will always see direct north regardless of the direction your caveman (or woman) is facing. You can pan the camera up/down and left/right a bit, but you will rarely use this, outside of keeping watch on circling birds. The sound however, is quite nice. Lots of ambient noise and a techno music, which enhances the caveman atmosphere (?), I think.
In reality, calling this game a caveman simulator is a bit misleading. After all, if it were a real caveman simulator, you would likely spend your time scrounging for food, fornicating with whatever happened along, and trying not to die in any number of horrible ways, as opposed to running around aimlessly like a weirdo, hitting everything that moves and listening to techno music. There is a day/night cycle, and your caveperson will fall asleep automatically, which can result from anything to a short, harmless slide down a hill to a senseless death by drowning, or killed by a carnivore or bird. Sometimes you will come across some strange artifact, UFO, alien, or cave system. The world is fairly large (for the time period), and there is a great deal to see, though little to interact with (outside of killing it), but in this wide world you have one goal: make a tower of woolly mammoth skulls to read the sun.
[img width=640 height=413]http://a.imageshack.us/img825/9320/tail2small.jpg[/img]
Cons - The cons are glaring, so I will take care of those first:
- The camera is a horror from beyond time. It is 3D, but you can only see in one direction: north. You can use the shoulder buttons to look a bit up or down, but you are locked into the same perspective, regardless of running direction. This becomes fatal when you can hear a bird, but cant see the direction it is attacking from.
- While the weapons (fists on up to stone-tipped spears) are adequate for dealing with large prey (rhinos, hippos, or mammoths), you will find yourself dying often when being swarmed by smaller opponents, such as birds. This sort of relates back to the camera, I guess, as I am convinced that a manual camera would have eased, if not solved the problem entirely.
- The world is very large, and there are a great many points of interest to seek out, but ultimately nothing to actually do. Since the mammoths only live in one place (far north) you will only end up finding these spots once or twice, and spend the rest of the game (every time you play it) collecting those mammoth skulls.
- The last thing I think I'll bitch about is the sleeping thing. Your caveman needs to sleep once a day. If you let him get on with it when he drops down for the night and everything will be fine, but sometimes you need him to be awake. Once you wake him up, your caveman can and will drop off into a deep sleep randomly, which will place you in situations when the caveman will drown or die while hunting or trying to escape a predator.
[img width=640 height=413]http://a.imageshack.us/img834/5605/tail3small.jpg[/img]
Pros
- The game is refreshingly original, and a joy to behold for the first time (if you are open-minded, that is). It really makes me nostalgic for the "anything goes" mentality that dominated the minds of many game developers during this era.
- The sound is great. From sound effects to music, it all adds either immersiveness (birds chirping at dawn) or ambiance to the final package. The strangest part is when the techno music starts up, and it actually feels right, like it belongs. Also, much like the Castlevania SOTN disc, there are actual music tracks on it, so you can place it in a normal CD player and rock out. Or whatever.
- It just feels good, which is enough to warrant a purchase if you're a hedonist, I guess.
- The game is cheap to moderately priced. While there are a number of knuckleheads on eBay trying to cash in on the sad fact no one bought this game in the day, you can usually find a complete game for under $20 on eBay. Quite a bit less it you're only interested in the disc. Another alternative to Goozex, where it goes for 250 points (about $12.50, though they usually give you 100 points when you first sign up).
Looking back at the writeup it appears that the bad totally outweigh the good, but that is far from the truth. Sure, there are quite a few flaws (some easier to overlook that than others), but I think there is something special here. If nothing else, it allows one to see a bygone age of game design, where nothing more was needed than a silly (but unique) sounding idea to green light the creation of a game.
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