The game is great, no doubt about it. Played it alot and always have alot of fun with this shooter. But if some of the changes in the diskversion of v1.2 really make sense, i have my doubts. Pause button makes sense and the possibility to save settings too, but the handling with this, is a little bit strange in my opinion. Let me explain why.
Now, after reloading the game, both, the highscore already achieved by the player and also his saved settings are no longer automatically loaded directly into the game. For this, the player now has to press "load settings" first, every time again. To be honest, i find this a pointless change. Suddenly, when the game is newly loaded, the highscore is gone every time and you are totally surprised about this, before you remember, that you have to load it in manually, every time again.
And it doesn't make much sense with the settings either. The option, of being able to save the settings, should actually have the advantage, that players don't have to set things like the difficulty-level and the Autofire every time again, when they wants to play the game. They choose the settings they like here, save them and that's it. Then they think, i must do nothing in the future again, to always have my saved settings again. This is, how it should be. But now you have to click the Load-Settings function every time again, only that your saved settings are here again. Where is the time-advantage then, in comparison, to readjust these two settings (Autofire/Difficulty) each time again manually?
Therefore both, the highscore and the saved-settings should be loaded automatically, every time the player loads and starts the game newly. In older versions of Zeta Wing the highscore also was loaded automatically and that this has changed now in V1.2, is a disadvantage, al least for my friends and for me. Also in all other games, such things were loaded-in automatically. Only in "Freaky Fish DX" i can remember a version, where you also had to manually reload your score each time, but that has changed again and in the latest version of this game, it was automated again. I guess, the programmers probably recognised, that the handling was not ideal when the player must do this manually.
Therefore i hope, that it will change again in a future version of "Zeta Wing". The possibility, that the player can save his settings is a good idea of course, but they must be loaded-in automatically, when the game is loaded and started again. I also spoke with some friends about this and they told me exactly the same thing, that they wondered alot, that after a restart, all of a sudden, their highscore and their saved-settings were no longer visible and active. Nobody had the idea, that these must be loaded in again, because this is really not intuitive.
Sorry for the long text, but i wanted to explain what i mean and that takes a few sentences. :-) The game itself is a fantastic shooter, of course, like many of your other games.