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.
I'd like to make a suggestion for the next cage match: a match-up between two great Zelda-like action-adventure games from the 5th generation starring cutesy versions of Japanese folk heroes.
Konami's Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (N64) vs. Square's Brave Fencer Musashi (PS1).
I always liked the cabinet artwork for Pac-Man. I think I liked it better than the Japanese art, for once.
Now here's a bizarre version of Pac-Man. This is the box art for the Atari 8-bit versions. I actually had this box art.
Amistrad was the one you were thinking of there.
