My first review - not normally my thing but after spending 24 hours with this game, it'd kill me not to share it with the community here.
This probably can be considered "Geometry Wars" for the PC. In fact, I went hunting for info on Geometry wars after playing this and the screenshots looked very similar. You've got your ship, you've got power ups, and you've got everything else which you've got to shoot the heck out of. Good mindless fun here, quick to get into and hard to put down.
Graphics: Simple yet effective. Actually, the bloom effect really helps give more of a vector monitor feel (let me know the second this works on a true vector monitor). It's quite scalable too as you can play windowed or full screen, and the resolution and playfield can adjust in size as well - looks great on my Betson at 800x600, and scales up to (and far beyond) 1920x1200 for playing native on some of today's widescreen monitors.
Sound: What's there you need? There's a retro soundtrack to the game (including Arkanoid samples on the title screen soundtrack if I'm not mistaken), and effects / explosions. Fits the game as it should.
Controls: Defaults to Dual Analog, but you've got the choice of mouse, keyboard, joystick, and hybrid as well. After selecting keyboard, I was able to configure each key to use both of my joysticks (with 1 extra input needing configuration for the Bomb button).
Gameplay: This is a lot of fun. I just recently started getting used to the dual joystick lovin of games like Robotron and this works just like that (with smart bombs). You move in 1 direction and shoot iindependently of that direction. Enemies pop up from all sides, and as the game continues it gets more and more frantic. 1 thing to note - rapid fire is turned on by default. If you want to be able to stop shooting, then this should be disabled, otherwise you'll constantly shoot in the last direction you aimed.
The worst thing I had happen was when I'd try to set off my bombs, I had to reach to button 1 on the 1P side (I mapped it there). A button on top of the joystick would be the perfect for this, but you play with the control panel you got.
This seems to be new as the date listed in the title screen is 3/13/06, so let's hope that there's more updates for this. I'd love to see this fixed up to accept coins and play games based off of credits (as well as bring up the main menu only when hitting a key not used on the default CP config), but turning the game into a coin op may have it's own issues if people think it's intended for commercial use... I dunno.
So here's linkage, and enjoy:
http://www.incitti.com/Blitz/And Images: