Here is my entry, Red Venom. It's a horizontal-scrolling shooter made in Pico-8.

Take control of the legendary space fighter Red Venom and defeat the hordes of invading aliens. Right?

Upgrade your ship to do even more damage! Spend points to purchase upgrades, higher scores mean more difficult enemies.

Commentary: This is my first attempt at making something for Ludum Dare and wow, was that stressful. The game in its 'finished' form had absolutely no testing. I was ten minutes away from the deadline and had yet to implement collision with enemy projectiles and one of the end boss' weapons would always wipe out the player in one hit.

Things I wanted to add (but ran out of time for): Scenery collision; music; better graphics for the title screen and hangar; more cutscenes (for example, the original idea was for the best ending to require a pacifist run)

There's a few known bugs: you can shoot whilst dead; the prices of upgrades in the hangar don't scale properly; you can buy the alien translator multiple times; and the translator was meant to cost 400 (lowered to 1 during testing and I forgot to change it back!) :@

If you just want to experience the story, well there's a cheat to skip to the end boss--hold up, X and Z. To get all the different conversations takes a minimum of 4 playthroughs (it's an auto-scroller so that shouldn't be too long!) :)