That's quite a lot nicer. Much more energetic. It also conveys a sense of shape better this way. It looks sort of like a horizontal shockwave in the beginning followed by a small mushroom cloud that rises toward the camera before dissepating. I don't know about the outlines, though. I played the game again, and later on it gets painfully cluttered, with white explosions with grey outlines, on a white ground with grey details, and white projectiles with grey outlines... I'm not sure about the art direction in the game in general, but I'll try to not complain much about that when the theme is already set... Just saying, the game is designed to be cluttered and energetic and explodey, but the 2bit palette does a terrible job at seperating one object from another. If each object type had a different color (blue player, red enemies, green projectile, yellow explosions), it'd be a lot easier to play than it is now.
Okay, I'm done complaining now. Also, it doesn't matter that our examples are sideview, since the timing is what we were trying to explain.