I didn't said it was too easy... it is more like the kind of difficulty is not the one I expected in this game genre. I was not expecting a "brainer" game, I know this is not a King's Valley, but some more than just shooting and passing screens. Some more challenge. But you are right: I'll give it a second chance in the next days and play it a bit more.

Moreover, I did not say you programmed it in a rush (did you? ;-) ), but it is true that some details are not as polished as it should. Nonetheless, I'll play it a little more.

However... I couldn't play the fixed version on my Turbo R. Sort of strange problem: the menu appeared, but the slime-option-selector just moved randomly. I tried in on my A1ST both using LOADROM and TRLOAD on the SD/MMC.

Try with ODO and force restart with CTRL. It works that way on my TR from the SD too.

Very good graphics, professional looking and pleasant music and fx, in the line of Relevo games. I had a parenthessis in my "gamer live" and, although I'm trying to update me about the classics listening podcasts and reading blogs, there are games that I didn't known, like Bubble Bobble. So to me it's the first time I play a game like this and I found it entertaining. And with this nice music, graphics and different behaviours of the enemies as you are advancing, it's easy to pass and pass screens. One of my favorites too!

I finally managed to play Malaika a bit more! So now I can make more specific comments

First of all, there are two things I'd like to say. First, in spite of the "things that I don't like", Malaika is a more than decent entry for the MSXDev. I decided not to vote it because of the tech problems that were patched past the deadline and because of some of the playability issues that I'm going to mention later. Without the technical issue, I think I would have given it 1 point and without the playability issues, it could have been one of my favourites. Second... I have nothing personal with Malaika. I feel I have to say that, because sometimes in the forums things go personal when they should not. I'm simply writing about it because platformers are one of my favourite game genres.

So, let's begin. One of the most evident problems is that due to their behavior, enemies tend to concentrate on the same place. Of course not always, but almost. In the first screens this is more than evident, especially in the screen with "RELEVO" written on top. In that screen, just to put an example, very soon all enemies concentrate on the same platform leading to a lot of flickering. But flickering is not actually a problem. The problem is of playability: when this happens, winning does not depend on strategy or ability or being fast, it only depends on luck. The only way to go through many of the screens is trial and error.

In general, the game depends too much on luck, on the "unfair" kind of difficulty. Thus, the game is "easy" because of the continues. Without them, it becomes almost unplayable because it leaved me with the feeling that winning or losing was outside my hands. Slightly improving the level design and the enemy AI would greatly improve the game playability, that's my opinion.

On the technical side, I found some flaws, not as important as the playability one. Also, I think you may be able to solve them easily. First, do the game speed increases as you kill enemies to make it more difficult? Or is it a problem of the engine? Second, about the sprite flickering. In a game with so many cases with too much enemies on a row, flickering should be exceptionally good. And it is not... I am not an expert on this issue, but I remember some threads here and in MRC about good ways of doing flikering. Finally, not sure about that but... are there some collision-detection problems? or it was that sometimes I don't know who hit me due to sprite flickering?

So... that's it. Nice Dev entry, for sure!

I think that I said enough about this game on older posts.
But, after playing it more I think, again, that this game needs to be faster or, just like mrpock says, make it faster with last enemies (like bubble bobble)
Also, there are the sprites flickering when there are a lot of enemies on the same platform. With a better level design, or just controlling on how much enemies can be on the same platform could be a good idea, but maybe I'm asking for too much... so please ignore me if Im saying something impossible...

Good work jon, good work!
Im waiting for that extended version!