Here is a quick example of what I mean about the shadows. I did a quick photoshop removing the shadow on the right of the play area and also correcting/reducing outer shadow of the bg circle (should be less depth than shadow cast by border) on the boss level to give a better idea what Im talking about there. this means the shadow from the bat should be greater than the circle but less than or equal to the border (I did not do that in the picture). In fact, if it were me I would personally use a alternating pixel checkerboard to fake a transparent shadow effect on the bat. You can get that with no cpu overhead if you use the neogeo sprite rotation feature.

Bear in mind that I have worked in a games programming environment so what I’m saying in previous post and here I would also be put to any of my own projects also.