When I was a professional games journalist these were the games I HATED reviewing. Not because they were terrible, but because they were SO close to being absolute triple-A classics but were spoiled by just a couple of bad, easily-fixable decisions that you had no choice but to knock off significant numbers of points for.
This is at its heart one of the best Xevious-inspired games I've ever seen on an 8-bit machine - it looks great and it plays brilliantly and would easily have sold as a commercial title back in the day. So just a bit of constructive criticism:
1. I wish people would spend half as much time on a full suite of sound FX as they do on music that I'm just going to switch off anyway if I have to choose between that and game sound. All games, but especially shmups, NEED sound FX, even if it's just a few zaps and bangs that actually make you feel like you're taking part in a space war (and audio cues for important events like a power-up appearing), rather than just watching a movie with the sound off while some nerd practices keyboards in the corner of the room.
2. The screen aspect ratio is just horrible. Zoomed in to the gameplay area on an emulator it looks fantastic, but you lose the score and lives readout, which takes up way too much space generally AND isn't symmetrical (you have a huge empty black area at the top and the score/logo bar all unbalanced at the bottom so it feels like your monitor's gone wonky), AND introduces a large wasted area down the sides. All you need is the score and number of lives, small and unobtrusive, in a corner somewhere (or even just popping up for a couple of seconds in between lives) and then you can fill the screen with the action.
3. Speaking of lives, seven is WAY WAY WAY too many to start with. The game is set at a good level of challenge for a standard three-life arcade game, not too hard and not too easy. But giving people so many lives - and handing out bonus ones like candy - makes even your first go last far too long and destroys the addictive qualities.
Of course all these things are your decision, it's your game and there are plenty of others I can go and play instead. But I'm a huge Xevious fan and I'd SO like to see this be the utterly awesome game it could be (and in gameplay and graphical terms already is).