Ahh Gradius, I always liked those games, my favorite is Salamander/Life Force, I especially liked the way it switched between vertical and horizontal scrolling. I kinda miss the old powerup select system, where you get to choose more speed, firepower upgrade, lasers etc etc, these days it's all about more and more bullets, rather than having to consider the best weapon for the job.
Look neat though, maybe could do with a bit more shading. It can be tricky to get detail in there, and tricky to animate as well, even if it is just rolling for up and down movement. What I've found looks quite neat, is to have layers. So you might have 2 wings, with the spaceship body in the middle, and then offset the wings to show up and down movement. One benefit in this, is that you only need to have collision on the body, not the wings, making collision detection a bit more realistic, and more forgiving. Not a bad thing in these games. Also, if you wanted you could get rid of a wing and have the ship fall out of the sky when dying. You could also have different wings for different weapons, upgrade the ship etc. Anyway, worth considering I think... there's probably thousands of cool ideas for enemies using that technique too.
Health, Ammo, and bacon and eggs!
