Review: Tail of the Sun
by Guy Tellefsen
	This isn’t a particularly well-organized review, but hopefully it
addresses most of the salient points. It contains a couple spoilers, but
hopefully not too many.
	Perhaps the best starting point for a review of _Tail of the Sun_
is to compare it to _Aquanaut’s Holiday_, Artdink’s previous
explore-a-big-world game. One Usenet poster commented that it would be
inappropriate to compare the two games, because _Tail_ is about a hundred
times better. While I agree that _Tail_ is much more fun, I still think
_Aquanaut’s_ may be a useful point of reference. Let me put it this way:
If you really liked _Aquanaut’s_ (as I did), you’ll love _Tail_. If you
kind-of-liked _Aquanaut’s_ but wished there was more to do, you’ll
probably thoroughly enjoy _Tail of the Sun_.
	If, on the other hand, you thought _Aquanaut’s_ was miserably
boring, as some people did... well, there’s still a good chance you’ll
like _Tail of the Sun_, but try to rent it before buying. You see,
although _Tail of the Sun_ features combat, caves, starvation, humor,
surprises, weather, and dry land, I think it’s still rooted in the same
philosophy: "Spend an hour or twelve wandering around, zoning out and
gawking at the scenery." Which suits me to a T, but it’s not what
everyone wants.
	In the game, you’re a cartoonish prehistoric human looking for
food to help your tribe survive, and for mammoth tusks to build a tower
to the Tail of the Sun. You have a gigantic continent to explore, packed
with forests, plains, deserts, rivers, lakes, outlying islands--you name
it. Vegetarians can wander around picking up the plentiful and varied
food items on the ground, or carnivores can go after the wildlife. I’ve
spotted about 13 species so far, not including the many regional
differences in coloration, and expect to find at least a couple more (so
far, I’ve mostly been focusing on the south and southeast).
	The graphics are simple, but well done. The basic structure of
the terrain is similar to the undersea landscape in _Aquanaut’s
Holiday_--hills and valleys composed of simple polygonal tiles--but a
good deal less drab. Weather effects, water, shrubs, trees, and food
items (many of which approach photorealism, in contrast to the rest of
the graphics) add variety to the view. There is some pop-up, but the
combination of fog and the game’s standard camera angle complement each
other to cover up the worst of it. In general, you get the desired
effect: a feeling of traveling through wide open spaces. The lighting
effects are well done, although sometimes the shadowed areas take on
strange tints; I suspect this is a function of the PSX hardware, because
I’ve seen similar quirks in other games.
	(Last night I noticed a bizarre lighting effect, although it may
have been my mind playing tricks on me. The weather and time of day
coincided to make the game’s sky a bright white; at the time, I was
running up a mountainside, so there was half the screen filled with
black/gray/brown and half filled with white. The odd thing is: I actually
had to _squint_ as though it were a bright sunny day! Maybe I just
haven’t been getting enough sleep.)
	So far I haven’t noticed any of the graphic crudities of
_Aquanaut’s Holiday_, where oftentimes, unusual items would appear to be
sitting on a rectangular "mat" of a slightly different hue than the
surrounding terrain. On the other hand, I haven’t found any underwater
novelties yet, because I’m afraid of drowning. (It would be nice if the
game gave you some clue as to when your character is getting short of
breath--I’ve drowned several times but never noticed any advance warning,
aside from the approach of the hovering Death Ghost, and by the time you
see that, nine times out of ten it’s too late to do anything. That tenth
time, though, is amusing...)
	The sound is very good. Some of the music tracks are better than
others, but the music never lasts very long anyway (except for the
return-to-village track, which sometimes seems like it’ll never end).
Nature sounds, animal noises, and your own caveperson’s jumping, eating,
and sleeping are all done perfectly. One minor irritation is that you can
detect the loop in the rain sounds. It only annoyed me for a minute or
two before I learned to live with it.
	The control is set up pretty nicely. Push up and you go north.
Push left and you go west. It can be a little awkward trying to attack
(circle button) and run (square button) at the same time, but I quickly
developed a knack for it. (The button setup is configurable, by the way,
but I just use the defaults.)
	General glitches:	--Once in a great while, you’ll find a
fish hovering just above the water. Or maybe that’s one of the surprises
you’re supposed to find...	--As someone else pointed out, it could
be easier to pick up the food. You have to align yourself pretty closely
to get it. Also, taking and eating could be compressed into a single
button push, although I don’t agree that it would be good to pick it up
automatically... you don’t want to accidentally pause for refreshment
while you’re fleeing a saber-toothed tiger. Which I do fairly often
(fleeing, not pausing). 	--When you eat a food that benefits your
legs, your legs flash. Great, but how do I know which food affects my
knees (jumping) and which affects my shins (running)? Currently I have
maximum strength in running, but never rise above blue (second-worst) in
jumping. And I like to jump. (The result of a jump appears to be a
function of your direction and speed of movement, your current jumping
strength, _and_ the angle of the terrain you’re on. So when you’re
running up a steep slope to get out of the water, jumping has the effect
of thrusting you back out _into_ the water. Hope you’ve been eating lung
food.)	  --Minor ambiguities in the manual. For example, is eating food
in the field less effective than returning it to the village? My theory
is that the benefits are the same in either case, and the "return" option
is just a way to let you travel to the center of the map quickly.	
--In caves, it can be hard to keep track of your character when he/she
gets near walls. Occasionally the graphics will break up when you move
into a corner.	  --This has happened only once, but it was irritating:
while selecting a new caveman, the sound stopped completely. After that,
the sound didn’t come back. The TV was fine, and the sound came back
after I re-started the machine and loaded my game. This was the first
time I checked my tribe after it reached what I assume it its maximum
population, so that might have something to do with it. Or it might have
been the machine overheating... it’s been getting a lot of use since last
Thursday.
	This would probably be an excellent game for children, in my
opinion. So far I haven’t found anything that I wouldn’t let a kid see.
Sure, there’s combat with animals, if you prefer fight over flight... and
if you choose, you can attack another caveperson, although there’s no
blood and you don’t get to eat them, so I’d say that’s pretty darn
wholesome. (Of course, some might object to the continent’s hut-sized
stone breasts... unlike the stone hands, feet, et al., they’re not
indicated on the map in the manual. There, I gave away a surprise.
Sorry.)
	I haven’t done much in the north so far, but I understand that’s
where most of the mammoths are. So, from one point of view, there’s no
real need for the rest of the continent, when you can fulfill the game’s
goals just by continually heading north; in fact, why didn’t they just
put all the mammoths right near your village so you don’t have to do all
that tramping about? From another point of view (mine), however, building
the tower is just one facet of the game. The "Zen experience" of
wandering around is the main attraction. And there _are_ mammoths in the
southeast and southwest! I’ve seen them.
	To sum up: I think it’s a fantastic game. I’m glad I bought it,
and I’m thinking of buying another copy for my sister, which would
probably make it the first console game I’ve ever bought duplicates of
(aside from some Atari 2600 cartridges that came as part of a package
deal). But _Tail of the Sun_ won’t appeal to everyone--the lack of a set
path to follow can be daunting, and although there’s a lot of neat stuff
to see, it’s spaced widely enough apart that you have to do a lot of
exploring to see it all.