In Bird Week, you play as a mother bird who has babies to feed in various nests in a grassy knoll. You feed them by picking up bugs and worms and feeding them to maturity, to which they take flight. However, you have to avoid this big, brown, evil bird that kills you if it touches you, and certain other creatures such as a leaping squirrel that will take you down too.

When I first saw this game in the listing on the Game Box, my first thought was "this sounds like a Magazine title - Bird Week? Sheesh, they could have called it "Bird Watcher's Quarterly". "This is BIRD WEEK, this week on BIRD WEEK, Yuji goes to Austrailia to teach us the life of the Kookabura, and visisting Wildlife expert David Attenbourough tells us about a new discovery of adding Shrews to the Hawk's diet, and Takanawa teaches us how to care for a Cockateau". (Just so you know, my older sister, who is a veteranarian, went through a HUGE bird phase in her teen years....that's where I get some of these references from).

So then I'm playing this and I start to realize some things, first off, this is a mid-Famicom early NES-era title, because it's just advanced enough not to feel like an Atari 2600 game with better graphics, but it's just simple enough to not be something I'd expect to have come out around 1988 or later. Second thing, this is actually a fun game, and really relaxing to play, slow-paced, like Antarctic Adventure, and a good game to play before going to bed (maybe I should hack it and make a version called "Nighthawk Weekly" or something). The controls are decent....so yeah, right off the bat I was thinking "either Nice Code or Hummer Team actually learned to make games and nobody noticed, or this is something else entirely!".

Sure enough, it's a Famicom game from Japan. Only in Japan would they make a game like this. Honestly, I remember for awhile, there was concern about females in gaming - BRING THIS OVER! Seriously, I could think of a ton of girls and women who would have adored this game. But alas, they probably would have had to put a bald eagle in it, and called it "Merican' Birdsitter - FRK YRRR!" to get it to sell here, and they would have had to have added a Yugoslavian AK47 as a power-up for the Eagle to use against that Chipmunk and that other Bird, just so a bunch of ultra-violent, cis gender suburban kids like myself would have been willing to play it here in the states - at least, that's how other parts of the world see us.