Have You Played... Lost Eden
Moorkus Rex!
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I never played Lost Eden. But I sure did watch the demo. A demo that brought me and my friend James the most ridiculous amount of utter delight, and a running gag that stays with us to this day. Wow, Lost Eden was terrible. Well, the demo was at least.
There's no doubt that Cryo's dinosaurific adventure was breathtaking to look at. Incredibly primitive now, but at the time it was like your computer monitor was doing actual magic. Like when you found the Weezer video on the Win 95 disc, and somehow your PC was showing a music video like a television. Here, share the moment with me:
Wow, it looks awful now. It's hard to really understand how human eyes work, that they can see these graphics as lifelike, when they already know what life actually looks like. (See also: original Far Cry.) And gosh, that music. But then, after all those pre-rendered shots of impossible graphics, suddenly there's Mr Blobbymouth Wizard Dude.
Sadly not included in that video is the moment of perfect stupidity, the appearance of Moorkus Rex, which was where James and I would lose it. Here he is:
It was the way his left shoulder was attached to his jaw. All that extraordinary rendering, those graphics like we'd never seen, and then they couldn't even be bothered to animate his jaw separately from his shoulder. To this day, when we meet up, we'll still exchange a hearty laugh with our shoulder bobbing up and down with our squared chin. Twas the best. The game was apparently terrible.
