A lot of people try to do quirky cutesy internet weirdness and fail, yuletown did it exceptionally right. I bet this one would run on real PSX hardware pretty well if it were ported with one of the modern dev sets.
The vibes are immaculate. My critiques or things I would hope get improved are: Any kind of res control, I had to use command line to not play in 21:9. General physics improvements, tweaking that takes a lot of time and effort [IME] but I feel like I have to come to a complete stop to make tight turns. Some kind of preview for the next checkpoint whether that's a map or just have it visible in a different color or in dithered transparency, too many moments where I just blasted past the next checkpoint.
All that said those vibes are in fact immaculate and I think the game deserves the attention to fix that stuff. Also hope those "ship setup" buttons become real at some point. Thanks for your hard work!
This is intensely good speaking as a huge virtual on fan, the only thing I'd note as an issue is I seem to get some kind of huge stutter when new effects show up. Freezes for a few hundred ms the first time I fire and the first time an enemy explodes, persists across launches. Minor nitpick in an otherwise stupidly good game jam.