Thank you for your comments and for the really detailed error reporting.
Aside from the log (which I'm ok with, but it's not something I gave a lot of thought to), this is all intentional :)
MINOR SPOILERS:
To spell it out, each of the three meta-screens is one of the 31 games (Oct 12, Oct 28, Oct 29), so three of the tapes send you to a weird winnable version of the corresponding meta-screen. I won't say this feature isn't buggy, because it definitely is, and feels, kinda buggy. But it was done on purpose; it's my kind of recursive structural joke.
e.g. Oct 28 is the date of the sticker placing minigame (the middle meta-screen), so when you put Oct 28 in the cassette player, it loads the Oct 28 minigame.
Hopefully this helps you understand what's going on.