Rico’s Roughnecks

Huntin’ bugs!
So, I think I’ve finally gotten everything taken care of.  I fixed the ladder stuff, and one small alteration fixed a couple issues I’ve been having with the boss.  I managed to reproduce that bit with the non-deleting fadeout blocks enough times to get a good idea of what was going on, and I haven’t seen it happen again since.  As far as I can tell, there are no more bugs in the level.
My sister is planning on working on graphics for the game as part of an independent study for her schoolwork, and once that’s done I’ll have a lot more work to do, as far as implementing rotating weapons and a head that looks at the mouse cursor.  Plus, once I have all the sprites for the ronin (to include the various states of his armor) I’m sure I’ll have some tweaking to do.
Until then, though, I need to start working on a menu and a title screen, to make the first level into more of a single-level game than a stand-alone program.  I’ve been running ideas on how to do so through my head for a while now, but I haven’t actually tried anything.  I think the pop-up menu will have “Load from last checkpoint,” “Save and Quit,” “Quit without saving,” and “Title screen” for options.  The title screen will have the scrolling steps I’ve mentioned before as the background, and “New Game,” “Load Last Checkpoint,” “Quit to Desktop,” and maybe a “Credits” thing.  It shouldn’t really be that hard to accomplish.
One thing I’m worried about is loading time because of the graphics.  I need to see if there’s a way to only preload certain graphics, so I don’t have to load dozens of levels of stuff when I only need enough for one.
Anyways, download the executable and give it a few playthroughs.  Any recommendations as to difficulty, placement of objects, or mention of any bugs you find would be greatly appreciated.  I don’t feel like I should be pimping myself out on Reddit or Stumbleupon yet seeing as most of the graphics I’m using have come from all over the damn place online, so I’m relying on the four or five people that look at this site to give me feedback.
Let me know what you think!