If I had to summarize this game into one word, it would be hypnotizing. In this game you navigate a ship through space avoiding the solid blocks and trying to pick up some points along the way. The points ultimately lead to power-ups, thus leading to more time play. The trick about this game is the blocks you must avoid are animated and moving towards you all the time. This makes it hard to focus on the blocks and thus harder to avoid. Once you get to level 4 you will know what I am referring to.
The game offers high and normal speed, but in my mind you would have to be insane to attempt to beat the entire game on high speed, even if you were using the option of infinite lives. There are several in-game options, among them side scrolling, speed control, passwordds for each level, in game contrast adjustment, turn power ups and animations on or off and as mentioned the ability to have infinate lives. The game also comes fully packed will story line and all.
My personal thoughts toward the game are good. I at first was very overwheled by the normal speed in which the ship flys through each level, but after a while got the hang of it. To me it is one of those games that you play and play and play until you beat it and then you feel proud, but you're not sure if you want to play it again, so you keep it on your calculator anyway. This is the ideal game that you can play and still listen to the teacher at the same time. It is very cahllenging, for all of you who think most games are too easy.
If I was to improve anything on this program, I would consider maybe a level editor. Obviously there are a limit to the number of variety of levels, and Thomas did quite well in varying them...well at least up to the 6th level....I didn't get any further. I at times had a little bit of trouble with the way the ship moved. In the game you can hold down the twp arrow keys and have the ship move faster. There were times when I would just tap the up arrow key and the ship would go two spaces. Besides that there were no bugs and I can obviously tell that this was well writeen, especially considering that the author started learing ASM 2 weeks prior to it's completion. Overall a great challenging game with not much variety, but it will keep you going for quite a while, of course assuming you have patients :-)
Great Job!