Birds in Video Games: California Games and Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage (NES)

I am old enough that I plated the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) when it was new. It ruled. We had our own console and games, but we also partook in the time-honored and must-missed pastime of shlepping to the video store to rent games.

Renting was a great system, because back in those days you could beat an entire video game in a night or a weekend, rather than spending hundreds of hours tweaking the length your avatar's moustache handles or whatever games are like now. Plus, you didn't feel bad about playing a crappy game because you were only out the cost of the rental.

Two of those crappy games were California Games and Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage. 

I remember them specifically as rentals because each had its own eye-catching box art that was hard to miss on the shelves. California Games, from 1987, featured a babe in a yellow bikini. The cover of Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage, from '88, was an absolute mess of shit including a surfing gorilla, a giant yin-yang, and some guy in like a tribal mask? It looks like hell, but I remember it clearly.

Both games looked to cash in on the late-80s popularity of skateboarding, surfing, and other "alternative" sports. Town and Country Surf Designs, aka T&C Surf Designs, is actually a surf shop in Hawaii, which is, having been to plenty of skate/snow/surf stores in my day and meeting the owners, quite a goddamn coup if you ask me. 

Anyway, California Games lets players choose between skateboarding, surfing, footbag, "flying disc," roller skating, and BMX. T&C Surf Designs has just surfing and skateboarding. Wikipedia tells me that California Games was a massive blockbuster, selling more than 500,000 copies. T&C Surf Designs was less of a blockbuster, and, in my experience as a player, sucked ass and was wicked hard.

But since they are both outdoor games they both have birds in them. Let's start with T&C Surf Designs.

Players, like this cat in a tuxedo (??), encounter a gull-like bird during the surfing stage. The bird flies in from stage left and tries to knock the player into the water. It's not a very well rendered bird. Logic would assume it's a gull, but there is nothing that black and white anywhere, and the bird is proportionally more like a goose with its big head. Frankly, I don't like it and don't want to talk about it any more.

There's a better-looking gull in California Games. 

This bird flies over the players head during the footbag stage, and the player can kick the sack up and cause the bird to flip out of control. It's a well-done gull! Gray wings with black tips and a yellow bill. The unmarked yellow bill makes this a pretty good fit for a Short-billed Gull (though the proportions and size are off), which can be found in the Bay Area in winter. The extremely revealing shorts that Alex is sporting in this screencap aren't maybe ideal for winter (though they are ideal for showing off those buns! Get it, Alex!), but there appears to be snow on the mountains in the background so who knows.

Birds in Video Games: Grand Theft Auto 6 Trailer

The trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6, maybe the most-anticipated video game in history, leaked on social media last night. It looks pretty goddamn rad. The game returns to Vice City, a fictional town based heavily on Miami, and the trailer is set firmly in the nutso world of South Florida. 

Plus, there are a TON of birds.

Watched GTA VI trailer 10 times now.

World looks beautiful and just cant wait to see some Gameplay.#GTA6 #GTA6TRAILER #RockstarGames pic.twitter.com/6aTSY5kBWc

— Hicks_26 🎮|👺 (@Hicks_26) December 5, 2023

Birds and other wildlife appear throughout the trailer, especially early on when the setting is being established. As I do, I wanted to take a close look -- going on the trailer and trailer alone -- and give my thoughts on how things look.

The very first image in the trailer includes some birds flapping and wheeling in the upper left. They are .. odd. They've got broad wings and are spinning in a kettle like Black Vultures would do, only they're flapping really quickly unlike any bird at all. Honestly they look like fruit bats. 

There are birds in very next scene, as well: some goose-looking birds flying over the barbed wire in the top left. The structure looks pretty good for geese, though they never fly in scattered flocks like this. Would be great to get the in a realistic formation, but they may not be geese at all.

The trailer kicks into gear (the Tom Petty soundtrack rules) with a flying shot over a beach, with a bunch of pelicans cruising past. They look pretty good for Brown Pelicans (I think the odd whiteness on their wings is just an artifact of the bright sunlight), which are the expected birds here. Not bad.

Check out this awesome shot of an airboat cranking through some Everglades-y landscape. Ducks are flushing from the grass, and they look pretty good for Mallards or other Anas. Getting South Louisiana vibes more than South Florida, but what do I know?

The moneyshot! Look at this goddamn image! This looks more like the Everglades, and has just a boatload of what look to be pretty accurate American Flamingos flying around. 

It's pretty funny. I know the summer of 2023 was a wild one for flamingos in the states, but they're much less common than many non-birders believe. As in, there's sometimes only a single known individual in all of Florida at any one time. A flock like this hasn't been seen anywhere in the U.S., not even South Florida, in centuries. Still, cool.

There are some other birds in this shot, too. There are some cranes on the left side that @ramone_rita pointed out on Twitter look okay for juvenile cranes, which have orange feathering up their necks, though the plumage isn't quite right for either Sandhill or Whooping.

There are also some ducks and/or geese on the right side, just over the back of a flamingo. 

 Birds aren't the only wildlife in the trailer. A bunch of gators make appearances (along with a pod of dolphins in one of the early overhead ocean shots), including one menacing its way into a convenience store. This image above, which appears to be from the social media account of some kind of in-game wildlife group, makes me think that there's probably a mechanic or side quest in the game for capturing troublesome wildlife. I bet there's a Green Anaconda round-up, or maybe some feral hog wrangling. We'll see.

Birds make a brief appearance in the very final image, too, flying by right above the guy's arm and behind the middle telephone line. Birds are all over this game, though my initial sense is that there's some work to do to make them as accurate as the rest of the South Floridian world playable in the game. We'll know more when the game comes out in 2025. 

Birds at Large: The Birds of Elden Ring

I know I'm about a year late on this but who cares. Elden Ring is a video game, and it rules. It's the latest in a series of games from a company called FromSoftware where the player travels some forsaken countryside killing monsters and knights and ghouls and all kinds of other what-have-yous. It's the first game in the series that I've ever played, but I've been obsessed with it for the past bunch of months.

Not everything in the Elden Ring universe is, like, a murderous skeleton or a blood-spewing demigod. There's also wildlife! They're just hanging around and living their little lives in the middle of an insane world of death and despair. There are deer and sheep and bears and pigs. And birds. Let's talk about the birds.

Eagle

The first bird you encounter in Elden Ring are these eagle-looking birds, just hanging out on cliff edges. They're vaguely Golden Eagle-looking, though aren't exactly that. They make a sort of chirping noise that I can't really place, and they fly when you get close. Maybe the most numerous bird in the game. 

Warhawks

The cliffside eagles aren't hostile, but there are some other eagle-type birds that do come after you and they're a real pain in the ass. Warhawks have blades attached to their legs (some of them also have falconry hoods), and they're massively annoying when they come attack you. Players just getting started through Stormveil Castle know what I'm talking about, but they're not any easier later in the game, like a nasty gauntlet of them in Crumbling Farum Azula, which you have to run through while also dodging a lightning-casting dragon. Ugh. 

Here I am about to get chonked in the back by this jerk in Stormveil Castle. 

Guillemot

These alcids are fairly common on the oceanside cliffs and beaches in the southern part of the map. Fitting with the UK bent of the wildlife in this game, this bird is what we in the states would call a Common Murre (EDIT: or, perhaps more likely, a Thick-billed Murre). The Guillemots in the game call when you're close to them, but it doesn't sound like the sound of real Common Murres, not sure what it is.

Here I am sneaking up on some of these MFers on a beach. So confiding! Maybe they're sick, from all the death. 

Owl

The least common of the cliffside birds, in my playing experience, is this owl. It's clearly a Northern Hawk Owl, but it sits on cliffs rather than on the tops of trees like real hawk owls. The Elden Ring owls make a soft hooting noise instead of the undulating sounds of a hawk owl. A missed opportunity if you ask me. 

A Bunch of Birds That Swirl Around 

If you climb up near the top of Mt. Gelmir, real close to where you have to fight that big rock bull guy, there are all these birds flying around. They sound like crows, but they're barely rendered and look more like swallows or something. I dunno. They're birds. 

Here's my dude climbing up the ladder and you can see some of the birds in the background. This isn't a funny post or anything these are literally just the birds from this video game.

Oh god no those Giant Crows

Some of the game's scariest and toughest non-boss enemies are these nightmares found around Caelid and Mohgwyn Palace. The Mohgwyn ones are covered in disgusting bloody sores, for good measure. I hate these shits and never want to see them again.

Deathbirds

There are four of these "field bosses" that appear at night in certain areas of the map. They're birds, I guess, in that they have "bird" in their name and they have, like, the skull of a giant baby owl. But they also have wings and arms, and are just generally not very birdlike. They're skeletons for chrissakes. Plus each and every one of them kicked my ass multiple times before I could find the right cliff to stand on to smoke them with arrows from a mile away.

Thanks that's all! Great to see you all!

Birding in Red Dead Redemption 2

My editors at Audubon let me write about birding and nature in Rockstar's new video game Red Dead Redemption 2. It's an incredible game, and by far the most naturalistic video game I've ever experienced. Read it here at Audubon.org or on The Guardian.

Birds in Video Games: Overwatch

Reader Meredith Nickerson passed along a tidbit recently about an avian character in the popular online multiplayer shooting game, Overwatch. It's a cute little tiny bird named Ganymede.

I don't play this game and so pardon me if I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but Ganymede follows around a giant robot character named Bastion, that actually does fights in the game. The backstory is that Bastion had shut down in a German forest and had overgrown with moss and stuff until Ganymede came along and woke him up. Now they're buds.  Wanna see a video of that? Here you go. 

Importantly, according to Meredith, Ganymede can take a number of forms, including some real life actual (sorta) birds.  Ganymede starts off as this little guy (gal?):

That is ... uh ... not a real bird. Some bastardized canary? I don't even know. Too bad.

The good news, however, it that Ganymede's got some other looks. You can change Bastion's skin in the game, and when you do Ganymede changes along with it. Check it out, as assembled by the folks at Overwatch Writing:

Pretty good! Check out that cardinal on top! ACCURATE BILL COLOR! The Rock Dove is spot on, and the Blue Jay ain't half bad either. The woodpecker could use a bit of work (if it is supposed to be a Pileated ... I couldn't find anything closer) but it's close. The White Dove is stupid but forgivable. 

Anyway, if I played this game I'd probably get my ass kicked because I'd just be watching Ganymede fly around instead of killing anyone. The end. Thanks, Meredith, for the tip. 

Birds in Video Games: Adventure Island II for the NES

The bird is just numb to it at this point. At first he was angry; screaming questions into the bright tropical sky. How did I get here? Who made me like this? A giant tubular beak for eating...what? There is no food on this island. Sharply hooked, footless legs...why? For what? There is nothing here to cling to.

Endless flying. Circling without stop. Anger led to depression. How could it end? Please let it end. Depression led to insanity, and now the bird can't even recognize the baseball-capped, hula-skirted savior under its beak. One well-timed jump from this shirtless, noseless man could end the nightmare. But the bird, eyes not focused but staring still through half-drooped eyelids, flies on.