I understand that some of the aspects of the gameplay are confusing or hard to deal with, but I'm pretty sure most of these are accurate to the arcade original.
As for the branch hit detetcion, you kind of just have to get a feel for where it's going to hit you (if there's one pixel of space between Yosaku and a branch, you're probably safe). The tree hitting position is also accurate, and was never an issue for me, then again I got used to it, and think it adds to the challenge. As for the boar, it's worth keeping in mind that it will always appear about four seconds after you completely chop down a tree, so after you do so, try to avoid hanging out on the right side of the screen so you can more easily avoid or hit it. For dying when walking into branches from the side, they probably still hit the top 8 pixels of Yosaku's sprite. It doesn't work no matter what, only if they visibly don't hit his head.
I have not implemented the option to change the pause key, but I may consider making an update that allows that and also removes the shift requirement.
I saw the sound playing for Ralph moving to be unnecessary, and the smoke cloud would just be too large to actually be displayed on hardware of this time, especially with all the graphics space that's already used.
If there's any platform I'm kind of interested in porting this to in the future it'd be the ZX Spectrum Next, I also think it'd be awesome to get some way to run it on a Raspberry Pi (would a GMS port work?)
I don't think I'm quite qualified to make it myself yet, but maybe I will in the future, I'd have to familiarize myself more with the design philosophy of racing games though, actually I have been thinking about doing my own version of TurboTime at some point
True, the gameplay would also probably have a few elements of arcade racers of the time like Daytona USA, Cruis'n, San Francisco Rush, Ridge Racer, etc
