It;'s mammoth!
The age old story of cave-men searching for woolly mammoth's tusks to use in building a ladder to the tail of the sun is played out yet again in Art Dink's Tail of the Sun. Seriously. As a nameless cave-man, it is your job to search the Earth in a seemingly endless quest for more tusks to build the ladder. Along the way, you'll find any number of different plants and animals to eat. Each type affects you differently; some will make you stronger, others will poison you. Eating enough of a given plant or animal boosts specific cave-man attributes, which ultimately affect the evolution of your cave-people There are monuments to find, caves to explore, and always more mammoths to hunt. Your cave-man's life is, predictably, not all that long, and you must return to your village periodically with enough meat to keep your cave-man population growing. When one dies, you become the next, and continue the quest. Though the graphics, even at the time, were not great either technically nor artistically, the world was impressively large. Eventually you complete your ladder and reach the tail of the sun, prompting one of several psychedelic ending sequences (based on how your people have evolved) which recount your story and presumably represent your cave-people's next step up the evolutionary ladder. Though many gamers will likely find the pace insufferably slow, there is a significant amount of sublety to the mechanics, and fininshing your ladder is strangely great. A lot of attention is currently being paid to novel new game genres and the indie gaming scene. That said, one would be hard pressed to find anything in the current landscape as flat-out strange as Tail of the Sun. Flawed though it's execution may be, Tail of the Sun is a singular experience, and recomended for fans of "alternatinve" games.
