I am spectacularly unmotivated today.

There is some good art out there. I enjoy looking at it. I am lacking in the motive force to try and make any of my own at the moment, though. My brain has curled up in the easy-chair of my skull, pulled a blanket over its head and is going “Shplaaaaaghgh…” whenever I poke it.

Been playing “Sly Cooper 2” on my PS2 lately–having newly acquired the console, I am systematically working my way through all the games people played years ago. They’re fairly cheap now, and it keeps me amused, when I have lost interest in the Level Treadmill of WoW for the moment.

It’s a cute game. Some of the character designs are charming. I love the moose guards, and the antelope guards, and the turtle character’s cute as hell. Some of them are shaky–the main character resembles a grey dog with a ringed tail, a sure sign of too much Generic Furry Characterdom, and the female fox resembles no species known to man. But they did a good job in general.

One thing, however, is making me insane, and reveals me as a wretched birder geek.

There is a level played where you’re stopping a French Canadian bison villain, in a snowy, glacier encrusted area chock full of ice flows and covered in snow. Fine, good, wonderful.

Every ten seconds, the ambient noises play a loon call, to remind you that This Is Canada, Eh?

Loons do not winter in the north. They head way, way south, to my neck ‘o the woods. They are a summer migrant to Canada.

You’d think I could dismiss this, being a reasonably well adjusted individual who lives with a level designer and is fully aware of how slapdash the game industry can be, and have been there myself god knows, but the three hours it took to pass this area, at a loon call every ten seconds, works out to somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand misplaced loon calls, and eventually I started twitching whenever it played. (And it never went away. Play the mini-game where you’re inside a computer shooting little blobs, and there is a freakin’ loon in the machine!)

I would beg game designers all to pay attention to this, but frankly, it’s so nitpicky that I can’t think of any reason you’d care at all–birdwatchers are not a known gaming demographic, and I have yet to see anybody boycott a title because of misplaced migratory waterfowl. Still. Damnit.

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