Pretty addictive game, I must be careful never to open it when I'm at work XD!
I tend to let the red path raildroad me a bit too much, and I end up never exploring the area. As a result, the opponents quickly grow faster than me and I'm ultimately outmatched. I get the feel I have to get a lot of those "permanent speed" upgrades in the early levels when we're still evenly matched!
The ASCII version reminded me of the games I used to play on my dad's ZX spectrum back when I was a young lad ^^!
On a side note: the, uh, "non-ASCII" version got stuck a couple times on the "connecting to database" message.