Is it just me or does any of you experience far from smooth gameplay? I do am running a three year old laptop, but ffs, a 2D scroller shm'up not being lightning responsive, REALLY? That's just lousy programming.

For the record I tried decreasing detail to low, which helps just a little bit. After setting 1024x768 it even becomes bearable in terms of smoothness but non-native resolution kinda kills the experience, black borders and all...

I can run this game on my Asus EEBOX(Intel Atom Dual Core @ 1.7 GHz 2GiB RAM and Nvidia ION) fine in 1280x720 and lowest settings. To get a smooth experience i had to set AF to 2x, Render ahead 2 frames, AF optimasation on, Tripple Buffering On, vsync on and texture filtering quality to high performance.

If you cannot run this game at a smooth framerate i bet you are using an Intel GPU.

Let me rephrase the problem then. Animation, scrolling and all the juicy effects actually look fine. What does not is the controls. When I first launched the game the pointer started moving as if it was glued to the surface. Almost a full second delay and somewhere around 10fps for the cursor in the menu. The worst is that the same applies to keyboard controlled ship during actual gameplay, surely not a good thing given the genre.

Apparently my hardware is not up to the task, I assumed intel i3 M330, 4GB RAM and some mobile version of Radeon are above the min. reqs, they certainly are above your configuration, yet something is off for me. It would be shame to wait all those years that I am not planning to upgrade just to play a simple shm'up (it will propably be a literally gog game by then). On the other hand minimum config might be just that, but then again it is a simple shm'up.

Ranting mode aside, is there anything else I can do to enjoy the game without playing in a post stamp sized window?

hmmm... you could "email objora@sumomgames.com with details of the issue. Please include the "Log" from the game root folder too."

in this case "details of the issue" ist just the link to this post.