I'm surprised

A lot of people have already pointed out that the animation is a straight trace from the actual game graphics. They're partially right, but these sprites are not actually hand traced but auto-traced using Adobe Illustrator.

You can discern this by looking at the jagged quality of the lines. Doing an auto-trace requires no effort at all, which would allow the author to rapidly slap this together in a matter of an hour or two.

Had you hand-traced the individual assets, I'd be more inclined to give you some recognition - considering that would imply that this was a practice run.

I surmise you spent a majority of your two months learning how to actually work in Flash.

I learned this lesson years ago: you don't submit quick, one-off school projects to Newgrounds. It'll get ya slapped upside the head by a nice sum of people.

Some people need to read between the lines

Your flash made me smile. The dry humor employed is pretty refreshing to a lot of the 'in your face,' stuff that America tries to shove down our throats daily. The randomness and pure absurdity is pretty good. That and your subtle bashing of truely poor artists and some allegedly 'good' ones is a crack up. Good show.

Be warned that there is a bug in the clock and bomb levels.

Clock Level: When you turn on the buzz saw and click off of the cutting path, the saw will shut off and cannot be turned back on.
Work-around: Restart and don't click off of the path.

Bomb Level: You cannot cut the orange wire that the bomb reports once you weld the wires together.
Work-around: I welded the orange components first, and then the rest. After I did that, I went ahead and cut the orange wire and it worked (after a restart from a "failed" first attempt).

Creator's gotta fix these bugs, but beyond that, cute, short game.

Not bad, man. I've been trying to figure out how exactly to get the Golden Ship, and I haven't figured it out just yet. I thought it may have had something to do with beating the game without using a continue. Perhaps it's doing it without dying? Or even killing absolutely every enemy? One interesting thing I did notice, which I'm not sure is or isn't a bug (outside of the obvious ones) is selecting the boss rush instead of the next level selection for every level. Even beating the whole game like that didn't yield the gold ship for me, however.

Anyway, somethings I want to point out:

Bullets versus Explosions:
Because there are so many particles flying all over the screen from killing enemies from large packs, you literally stop being able to see the bullets. It's like a kind of sensory overload, and that's likely what the other complaints are regarding. Something a little more low-key for explosions or something a bit louder for the bullets would be the best bet here. I know you said you never played Touhou, and you should. You'd learn a lot about Danmaku and get some ideas on what will and will not work visually.

Enemies on the Rear:
Some of your waves with these things are just annoying. There are circumstances, even on the aggressive route, where I just can't kill the buggers because they actually take more than three or four shots to kill. When they're coming from two directions, or are meshed with one or two frontal waves, It gets downright silly trying to kill everything - and then my bonus multiplier goes down the toilet because of it. Worse still, these are the situations that are the most frantic, as well, blinding me entirely from what's going on.

And that's about it. I'll just kick back and enjoy my 1, 106, 230 point score now ;)

Platformers

You understand the curtain fire (bullet hell) mechanic really well, I'll give you that, but you're missing a lot that actually drives the platformer genre. This game is very well built, the atmosphere is nice, but the mechanics are way off. Enemy timings and behaviors are awful for both regular enemies and bosses. While it may seem like the enemies have a touch of randomness to them, this is not the case. The problem is that you telegraph what the enemies are going to do very poorly or not at all. This is pivotal to appropriate reaction time on the part of the player, otherwise they spend more time cautiously approaching enemies than actually playing the game - unless, of course, you've memorized every enemy's pattern in the game (This is what game developers do if they test they're own game and what testers do if you don't rotate your testing groups).

The platforming is overplayed. I honestly started to ask myself when I'd reach contiguous ground. I became more irate still when I found that the running trend was going to be a monster that took more than one hit on a platform large enough only for it and nothing else. Magic didn't terribly help this either, since it made sense to shoot the enemy with a fireball and have them walk off of the platform. The problem with that is that you run out of magic quickly and then in turn have no support skills.

My honest recommendation to you is to play the classics again, man. Mario, Sonic, and Mega Man. Since your gameplay style most closely resembles Mega Man Zero, I recommend playing Mega Man Zero 3 on the Gameboy Advance. Focus hard on what really makes these games work and work well.

Well damn, this is a pretty metal tune, dude. I'd actually like to see you finish this. I liked where you were going with it. Tell me though, after the small chunk of the song you did remix, how were you planning to complete the rest of it? Were you going to include some keyboard or was it going to just be straight up, raw, unrestrained metal?

Unfinished you say?

Unfinished or not this track is solid, catchy, and downright badass. I think the major point that I like about this song is how you continue to build up more and more energy as it carries on. Even well after the introduction of the song, it continues to build the energy with each verse. This is seriously a song I can hear in both a club and in some sort of conclusive battle or cinematic for a game.

The song's tempo is good and strong, I can hear and feel the rhythm behind the electronic melody, and the mastering (even in an incomplete stage) is solid. This is great stuff, Luke, I hope to hear more.