PixlBit

Stage select:

1. Sakura Wars 2 for Saturn. I loved the fifth game in the series, which was the last PS2 game I bought new ten years ago (wow!) I love the SRPGs of that pedigree in general, which includes Valkyria Chronicles. 

2. Burning Rangers for Saturn. As Casey said above, it looks like fun. Another 1UPer did a really neat write-up on Burning Rangers. 

Side note: I actually own Panzer Dragoon Saga and have played it. Its battle system has a lot of shooting elements from the shooter games in it.

Can't really think of any others. I would definitely have said Mother 3 had I not bought a reproduction cartridge with the fan translation and played it.

Cage match: Both great games. Going to go with Galaga overall since it's more polished from both the gameplay and presentation standpoints, but Centipede was probably Atari's best game, and it's certainly the game I play the most on Atari collections. 

I know I submitted a bunch of cage matches, and this was one I picked, but I actually have one I'd like to submit for future consideration: Dig-Dug versus Mr. Do!

This makes more sense than any actual GTA content released in the past ten years. 

I'm a health care worker. Not only am I still working, my job is crazier than ever. As I write this, I have eight hours left of my shift. Come 8 am, I'm off for a whole week, then back to the grind next Monday.

Witcher 3, trying to find Langrisser 1 & 2.

Of course, in FFIV, most of the deaths ended up being reversed by deus ex machinae.

I can see your point, we're supposed to be self-disciplined, our pets are kind of hostages to fate. But he won't be the worse for wear, and he'll lose that winter weight in due time. I kind of got lazy too during winter, at least in my off days. But as part of my prep for Havasupai, I've been hiking on Piestewa Peak, which is one of the many mountain preserves in Phoenix, and it's underscored how much work I have to do in five months. And during the summer, with my work schedule and the intense heat in the Valley, it's going to be very difficult to do hiking on work weeks since my time off from work is the prime midday hours when the temperature is the highest, while I'll be working through the cooler dusk and dawn hours.

One of the nice things about Phoenix is that there are many mountain parks here, right within city limits, with the big prize around here being Camelback Mountain. There is also good hiking up north in Sedona.

I wouldn't be too sad to lose E3. Since it wasn't open to the public unlike most other major shows, I never saw the point of all the expense of it, and that's even more true now that the Internet and social media allow companies to hold their own reveals. And for the most part, most of the attention was focused on the big dogs, such as the console makers as well as the three largest Western third parties, none of whose products I care much about. I mostly read about it after the fact, though I suppose I'd have loved to have seen the reaction at E3 '95 to Sony's simple "$299 USD" announcement of the PS1's launch price. I always thought Tokyo Game Show was more interesting, and even Gamescom in Europe got announcements that E3 didn't. PAX and TGS have pretty much supplanted E3, and both of those shows are open to the public. For press announcements, I'm fine with reveals being done through things like Nintendo Direct and equivalent showings from other companies. All that pomp and circumstance for an event open only to industry insiders is honestly kind of wasteful. 

While I do think E3 was winding down somewhat, the coronavirus scares are pretty serious (how justified the scares are remains to be seen as to how the pandemic spreads), and I definitely think they'd have been doing E3 if the concern wasn't there. Trump just closed off all travel to the US from Europe for a month, and right now, air fare is otherwise dirt cheap ($113 from Phoenix to New York, round trip, on a midday direct flight would have been unheard of two weeks ago). The Utah Jazz and the OKC Thunder are quarantined in the OKC arena due to Rudy Gobert of the Jazz testing positive. Certainly China is feeling the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and for better or worse, so much of the video game industry now is tied to China. Maybe the industries in Japan and the US will start to realign themselves away from China in the wake of the disruption caused by the coronavirus. Do y'all think that this will end up with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X being delayed to next year?

Your thumbnail picture reminds me of amused I was with some of the  product placement in FFXV. The crew camped out using Coleman camping gear, and most of the shops in Tenebrae took American Express. And I know a famous fashion designer designed some of the costumes in the game, she got a lot of product placement as well. FYI, Vault 112 was a virtual reality simulation run by a mad scientist where the "good" solution was to sabotage the life support system, allowing the inhabitants to die in real life. 

Stage Select:

Wrestling isn't my cup of tea. I did play the occasional WWF game in the NES/SNES era. I might try wrestling if it were included as a mini-game in a RPG or adventure; Twilight Princess had a couple of sumo-wrestling segments in it that were kind of fun. I did notice that Take-Two doesn't seem to be using Yukes anymore for its WWE games and is trying to just utilize their California studio, Visual Concepts. Maybe if FFVII Remake included it in the Wall Market segment or the Gold Saucer arcade.

Cage Match:

I'm going to go against type here and vote for Doom: Eternal over AC. Doom is my go-to for first-person shooting action. I'm actually waiting on the Switch version of Doom: Eternal, which apparently impressed id Software with how well done it was. While Nintendo is far and away my favorite publisher/developer, Animal Crossing is not one of my favorite Nintendo franchises. Other than dabbling in the original Gamecube game, I've never gotten into it. So there you have it: I voted for a US-made FPS over a life sim made by Nintendo.

Sounds like you've been busy. I need to get to working out and in practice for hiking myself. I was able to score hard-to-get passes to for a hike to Havasupai Falls, which is in the Grand Canyon on land owned by the Havasupai Tribe. It's a 14 mile hike where the overal climb in elevation is equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building. The falls are beautiful. I go in the first week of August. 

I watched Dragon Quest Your Story. Its ending was pretty meta. I liked the fact that it was based around one of my favorite games in the series.