Thanks everybody for your kind comments about Vektar. I have a clear idea about what version 1.0 will actually be and I'll be releasing it shortly, depending on how long it takes me to solve certain technical problems. Most likely another two weeks or so.
Note that there is a bug in the competition version where if you play a second game without exiting first, you won't get free ships right away; I forgot to reset the "next free ship score" variable. Sorry about that; you need to exit and restart the program between games.
I thought there were a number of impressive entries:
BubbleTrain is great and a deserving victor.
Beat2X is a lot of fun!
I haven't seen much mention of Extraterrestres but I think it's a very solid and fun game; the artwork is really nice and the variety of options makes it interesting to keep playing.
Ladykiller has pretty interesting gameplay and is coded very well with a nice look.
Vanguard Wars gets pretty absorbing once you get the hang of it.
Radek's demo is very impressive. If he builds a game that makes good use of his blitting routines it could be really great.
GP General looks very promising but with the text being unreadable it's not really playable yet. If MiSaTo keeps working on it this will be a very popular game!
Pulplife has some fairly nifty graphics and a nice cinematic feel to it, but I haven't really got the hang of it yet.
Those are the only ones I have gotten to so far, but I'm looking forward to trying Blockrage2x, Whacky, Yahtzee, PokeParadox, and of course Goitfights.
I don't have any games for other consoles so I'm not really into emulators myself but from the look of it, Gnuboy2x was an impressive and important release.
What fun!