Tail of the Sun

"Look, a rice cake! Let's punch a monkey! Oh, I slept...?"

Tail of the Sun looked extremely cool when I looked at the back of the game case. Most people would just ignore it, and that's really the way it should be.

First of all, I have to be honest. This game is really original and innovative. Yes, there really was never a game before where you performed caveman actions like walk, run, sleep, eat, throw, and drown in the ocean... and there never were any games with absolutely no point at all.

Okay, so there is a tiny point. You have to build a tower out of mammoth tusks that is stacked to the tail of the sun, hence the game's name. Why are you doing this? Well, no one knows or cares, but when you do it, you win the game!

If you haven't figured it out by now, Tail of the Sun is about cavemen and cavewomen. When you start the game, you choose your character, which are all exactly the same, save for appearances and sound effects (which differ by gender). Then you are taken to a giant filed of green scribbles, or possibly grass. Littered all over this grass, within a few inches from each other, are foods. Many, many strange foods such as sticks, shells, rocks, and other things, but in reality these things are all sweet Japanese rice cakes. Yes, this makes sense... or wait, no it doesn't. Your job is to eat these, but only if you want to. When you do this, your body will change color for a second, and that means you got stronger. This makes it about 0.01% easier to kill animals than before.

That is your next task. Kill stuff. You do this by throwing rocks and punching. Most animals are difficult to kill except for the ones close to the starting area. These are mildly easy. When you kill one, the screen will freeze and say "RETURN??" and you pick yes or no. If you pick YES, your cave people tribe will be more likely to have babies because they aren't hungry (but the babiest are full grown adults! Yay!). If you pick NO, you will eat some meat. Yum.

Eventually, you will have to find a mammoth and kill it. Then you get meat AND tusks, which makes you build on your tower to the tail of the sun. When you finally kill enough mammoths, you win. Depending on which types of foods you ate the most, you get different endings, which are basically all the same thing.

So let's review each part of the game.

Graphics

The graphics in Tail of the Sun are ... well ... horrible. Your caveman is nothing more than glitchy polygons, and that goes for just about everything else. I fought a few animals that I had no idea what in the world they were supposed to be. Just expect really bad graphics, and that's all I really need to say about it.

There is one time that the graphics differ from the norm. When you get a tattoo, the screen psychotically flashes different colors, in a way like a broken NES console that's plugged in incorrectly to boot, except Tail of the Sun looks worse. This probably could cause seizures. When this stops happening, you will suddenly have a tattoo on you. Now you can walk in the water for an extra second or something similar to that.

Sound

There is very little sound in this game. Annoying sound effects that make little sense and repeat themselves over and over are exactly what you're going to be hearing the entire time you play. Nothing different really ever happens at all.

Gameplay

This is where the game is the absolute worst. The controls are sticky and unresponsive. You can press a button and then take a short nap before the caveman does what you wanted. When you let off the directional pad to stop walking or running, your caveman slides across the ground more than in the trickiest of Ice Levels in a great platformer. Eating food is difficult because you have to approach it from a perfect (and random) angle and make sure you're not standing too much on or off the food. Sometimes during the game, you will just fall over and be asleep. When this happens, your caveman could randomly just start gliding across the ground for no apparent reason. The camera is always at one angle no matter where you are or what you are doing. The screen scrolls in such ways that you don't see things until you get very close. When you walk in water, you just walk along the bottom, even though it's supposed to be realistic. Even with the Swim Tattoo, you just walk around on the ocean floor. Then you drown and die. Dying is kindof random in this game. You can die of hunger or fatigue, but there is absolutely no way to tell how tired or hungry you are.

There are many, many more flaws with the gameplay. It's hard to find something about this game that isn't flawed or glitchy or boring.

Replay Value

If you like to get multiple endings and can bare through eating rice cakes that look like shells for hours on end over and over and over, you might want to play this more than once. If you're even remotely close to human, you'll probably want to shut it off when you first start playing it.

Overall

Don't just take my word for it; go out and see how messed up this game is on your own. While it might not be fun, and might look horrible, it can entertain you just by how screwed up it really is. I mean, my friends and I laughed forever as we battled braindead monkeys and tried to throw rocks at birds... and ate rice cakes... rice cakes... rice cakes... that's about all the game is, really, rice cakes... but sometimes you do other things, and that's funny, too. So if you find this thing for a dollar at a garage sale, pick it up. It'll be worth it... maybe.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/05