looks decent
dislikes:
the ship moves way too fast. i'd slow the thrust rate (and maybe rotation rate) and cap it much lower.
the ship can spawn into a collision w/ an asteroid (i'd either make a check that the spawn point is "safe" or allow the ship to be invulnerable for a couple/few seconds so the player can move to safety). cause for unnecessary frustration here.
unstable end game. depletion of lives left the application hanging. had to close using task manager. 2nd try running it resulted in same thing happened after death but before lives were depleted. hit by an asteroid and game froze. (could this be something to do with my older graphics card?)
asteroids can travel for quite some time in the dead zone (ie, in the hidden area around the screen edges). might make periodical checks for this. had to spray the edges for awhile to find the hidden asteroid and move on to the next stage.
likes:
nice, simple, effective explosions
ship model
physics and collision appeared solid/accurate in the 3 test runs i made.
definite potential for 'gem' status. i know you didn't spend much time on it but should you decide to revisit it, i'm sure it could be one heck of an asteroids clone. good work
Virtual Nomad
Athlon XP1800+, Windows XP+SP2, Soyo K7V Dragon+ MB, 1.5Gb 333 RAM, ATI Radeon 8700LT (128Mb)