ok, I mentioned the resemblance in the read me file, and now I feel better about it! 
Some recent news: Repro Factory will make a physical edition of the game!
I'll hopefully make on some improvements for this new edition (mostly some of the things that have been suggested earlier in this thread 
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I think that making the ship turn slower while holding the fire button is not a good idea. That will conflict with situations when the player want's to fire and turn simultaneously (but want's to turn at regular rate), and I presume it will make predicting the turning rate very difficult especially in the case there is no constant autofire, or the player does not want to use that (In this type of games, I believe the players brain is predicting - mostly unconciously - the amount of time needed to press the button for a certain amount of tunring, and this process will be hindered).
So if this kind of feature is implemented, it should be made so that it does not conflict with something else (but IMO it is not needed, since personally, I do not find the turning speed too fast...). But perhaps it could be tried in a testing version/branch first?
There are already two buttons in an MSX joysticks and the second one is not used as of yet
The most important reason I crash unintentionally is the lack of smooth scroll - that makes it really difficult to estimate the speed of the craft at some situations. But I realize this can not be helped on MSX1 machines, but perhaps if this will be an MSX1/MSX2 game! A related suggestion: I believe bullet sprites are now drawn in relation to the playfield. I think it would look nicer (without smooth scroll) if they were drawn in relation to the player ship instead!
Hmmm, you have a point. Ok, ok, I'll think more about it. I'm currently using the second Joystick button as an alternate "thrust" button. But perhaps I can have some "secret" config screen to set the ship turn speed.
As for the bullets, actually the initial version had the bullets in relation to the ship, but it looked a bit weird (like the ball, that some times jumps). But I can also set that that as a config option
So, in summary: config screen to let people configure and MSX2 detection to improve scroll then
Today I finally found some time to do a proper testing and yeah! I also like this game a lot!
I must also say that the learning curve is pretty steep and the walls just feel they want to jump on you to kill you. Especially since you want to move slowly on this kind of game the 8-pixel scroll really starts to be a problem. I really hope you implement the smooth scroll that Artrag suggested. It should be pretty straight forward. Only "problem" is that you need to subtract the scroll amount from sprite positions in case of MSX2. In case you add this kind of MSX2 support, you may also want to consider using custom color palette. After that I think we have a great game on our hands... for both standards
Thanks NYYRIKKI!!!
I'll start playing with scroll idea this coming week. Let's see how does it look!
