Birds Dropping: The Decline of Avian Adversaries
 

Grab a Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Atari, or Sega system and start popping in adventure and platformer games. As you play through these games, you will noticing a disturbing enemy haunts you through them all: the bird. In one form or another, gliding, flying, winged enemies haunt you everywhere. They seek your blood and devour your soul as they knock you around.

It didn't matter what you had. You could be a sword-wieling knight, a laser-shooting lass, a jumping plumber, or a magic-casting badass, or even a spinning hedgehog, the bird was going to bring you down. Usually into a bottomless pit.

But that has all changed. As systems get more powerful and gaming changes to 3-dimensional for just about every concievable game type (i'm awaiting 3-d Dr. Mario any day now), I noticed that our avian adversaries are slowly becoming extinct. With hundreds of characters discovering the amazing ability to move left, right, forward, AND back, the traditional suicidal dive-bombing of birds has simply become a tactic of the past.

I dedicate this thread to remembering our avian friends, and the billions of lives they destroyed.

Like those damn vultures in Donkey Kong Country, who ALWAYS showed up right when I was a split second too late to avoid them.

Actually, from my experience, early RPGs had very few flying enemies. FF1 had only 3 (COCTRICE, PERILISK, AIR). A lot of others were "flying" in that they were resistant to Earth spells, but they were all ghosts and fish. It's really not until later that RPGs got more birds.

Side-scrollers are another matter.



However, I do see a trend in flying foes going downhill in some things. Grandia III classes a lot of crap together in only tenuously logical catagories to cut down from previous games. Birds are lumped in with Beasts, despite 99% of their other qualities and tactics carrying over from older games of the series. But they are still there, otherwise unaduletrated. Final Fantasy also has its share of birds. Other games, especially shooters (I'm thinking DMC), hardly have any birds at all, though.

I guess looking at it this way, it's a reversal of roles. RPGs seem to have more birds than platformers now because they don't have to worry about how the player is going to hit them in three dimensions without some serious help. That and the FPS scene focusing on ground-bound humans and aliens has led to a decline in that area, where reality has become more important, whereas fantasy games can make up any physics or other excuse they want and don't have to worry about adding them in.

In a 3D environment, most of your view is of what's around you, and not so much what's above you. Maybe smallish bird enemies would be pretty cheap in such a setting.

I'd like to point out that Subspace Emissary had dive-bombing birds.

And Subspace Emissary was a 2d platform adventure, i.e. EXACTLY where birds are found.

Yeah. I guess my point is, 2D FTW.

First thing I though of was HL2, Ep1, and Ep2, and those all had birds.

For a 3d example, Starfox 64 had a lot of magma birds flying around in the Solar mission.

Granted, most of them were far enough that you had plenty of time to shoot them, but some were just irritating.

And hey, if we're counting things that aren't quite avian, Castlevania has tons of flying bats and Medusa Heads to happily knock you into a pit... or in the Metroidvania games, simply knock you down that veeeeeeery long drop that you'd spent a full minute climbing, often falling into a bed of spikes.

Metal Slug had Nazi bomber planes. I always hated those, specially the red one that always took a bajillion hits.

Those are again, 2D games.

3D games that still have birds (Or just flying enemies) are FPS. 3D cuts back on birds because the camera is above, but in FPS it's first person view, so it's easy to look up.

Except for like, that huge electric Griffin boss who apeared 3 times in DMC1. Not that DMC doesn't have aerial foes though, what with en masse bug swarms, floating skulls, scissor/scythe wielding ghosts, giant plant snake demonesses, angel demons and flying statue guards, not to mention the various ways in which even grounded enemies can take to the skies to assault you.

In a similar vein, GoWs harpies are quite common, attack en masse and even kamikaze on you.

And let's not forget collosus' 5 and 13 from SotC, 2 of the best fights in the entire game right there.