The game works on Windows 8.
Quite a good start, most of the space shooter elements are there.
I have a couple of suggestions,
beef up the enemy ai and randomize the spawn point, you can just stay in one spot and shoot and they all spawn in your line of fire, there is little incentive to move around a lot.
at the start, please put up some tutorial text. I spent my first two lives frantically pressing buttons on my keyboard trying to make my ship do something. I then realized you could shoot with LMB and move with mouse move, but did not realize that you could fly with RMB. I thought it was one of those auto scroll shooters.
lol I had clocked up some serious points before even leaving the starting screen.
aside from this there is just tweaking and beautification to add.
add some interesting and overpowered timed weapon upgrades.
add some different squadron patterns and ai behavours for different types of enemy ships.
more visible powerup items that are a little less picky about you being exactly lined up with them.
with some nicely drawn backdrop art and some really bad japanese midi rock music this will be quite neat.
maybe add some random manga comic team mate encouragment/flimsy storyline.
comic strip/manga cutscenes to swap between radically different level styles.
oh yeah, and add the ability to choose your pilot, at least one of them should be a steroid freak westerner.
I like what you are doing. Keep up the good work!
I'm not a complete idiot -- Some parts are just missing.