PixlBit

My stance on "free to start" games - at least Nintendo is being somewhat more honest than other companies in using this terminology rather than using the weasel words "free to play" , I guess - is that you get what you pay for. I hate the drive towards excessive monetization and games-as-a-service instead of games-as-a-product. Hopefully Nintendo will never go all out on it like EA, Bethesda, and pretty much every developer on iOS or Android do. It's one reason why I won't touch mobile games with a 39 1/2 foot pole.

Top edgelords I'm gonna have to think about a bit. I haven't seen a lot of game characters that are covered in Dorito dust mixed with Mountain Dew Game Fuel and wearing fedoras. The only fedora-wearing game character I can think of right now is Tex Murphy. I dunno, maybe Doug TenNapel?

Cage Match:

This is actually kind of a tough one for me. Surprisingly, despite one being on a N64 cart and one being on a CD, the two games have a similar amount of content, with Konami even throwing in a couple of musical numbers with Japanese vocals in Mystical Ninja. Musashi definitely got a better localization, as Konami did the bare minimum, and a lot of the Japanese humor fell flat. Goemon would have been a perfect project for Working Designs to handle. On the other hand, Musashi also had the first playable demo of Final Fantasy VIII, lol. 

I think I'm going to give a slight edge to Goemon here. Part of that is because MNSG was one of my favorite non-Nintendo N64 games,  although in the N64's case, that's like a bowl of chocolate Jell-O pudding winning out over every other dessert on the table because it was one of the few desserts on the table that wasn't just literal shit in a bowl. It just played better than Musashi for the most part. It did 3-D Zelda before Ocarina of Time did. It even had its own version of the Hookshot. 

I had the Balloon Fight G&W. It played like the "Balloon Trip" mode in the NES game. It honestly was one of the better of those LCD games they had back then. I had a bunch of Radio Shack's LCD games. Never was interested in the Tiger LCD games, in part because just as they started getting really popular, I got my first Game Boy.

I never saw Lunar Rescue, but I played a home computer clone of it: Stellar Shuttle, which was made by Broderbund. In later levels, Stellar Shuttle had a reptilian beast on the ground which would eat the astronauts, though you could kill it by burning it up with the ship's exhaust.

The era of the first two Zeldas, the first Dragon Quest, the first Metroid, and Kid Icarus. What a time to be a gamer.

1943 is a great game.

I bought an A Link to the Past shirt and wore it at the Biltmore shopping arcade one day. Got in convos over it with two girls and a guy.

Of the games you listed, I played Spy Hunter and Gyruss a lot. I had those on my Atari XE, on the same floppy disk in fact. The vehicular combat was pretty fun. My favorite game of 1983 was the original Mario Bros. First appearance of Luigi.

Played this one on NES, wasn't a huge fan, though I remember the punny name. There sure were a lot of games inspired by Rambo and Platoon at that time. 

Joust was a favorite of mine that I played with my sister at home on our computer. Nowadays Balloon Fight (a great game in its own right that was the first game ever produced by Nintendo's third president, Satoru Iwata) seems to be the only fix we get for that sort of game. I have a mini Dig-Dug arcade machine, and I have DK Junior and Moon Patrol on Switch.

I actually played the computer version of Star Raiders first and got good at it, but I could never figure out the 2600 version. I always preferred Activision's Star Master on 2600.

Happy birthday buddy. The Nintendo and Square Enix stuff looked really neat. One of these days I'm going to make it to PAX. 

For your birthday I give you a gift card for Whataburger, in honor of BurgerTime. Hopefully you're not a vegetarian though, that gift wouldn't do you much good.