This is great! I played until I beat one of the giant ships, which I probably wouldn't have done if there hadn't been no penalty on death -- that was a nice idea to make this game pretty accessible.
I found it pretty hard to know which ship was the important one when I had several following me around -- I tend to watch my ship out of the corner of my eye when playing a game like this, so I think the extra engine animations from the dark ships were what distracted me. I'm terrible at SHMUPs though, so there's also that. ;)