Is this all made with standard animation tactics, or is it particle-systems?
Nope it is a particle system with emitters, effects, and the such.
What kind of gameloop are you running? I see a tiny bit of frame-skipping due to it running about 58fps constantly. You should really make an effort to get a stable 60fps for smoothness on most screens. There are many great tutorials around this forum, and I believe complete code-examples as well. I know I left one somewhere. I can find it if you'd like.
I was running a really bad game loop....the first one I ever did was recursive and I got stock overflows all the time....
All of my code was made without interpolation in mind so when I found out about that form of game loop I did not want to rewrite meh code.
The new one I am using gives a steady 60fps not a lot of jittering that I have found.
UPDATE:
I have updated the link to my new menu. I think I got the look and feel down so now its time to make game. The menu should give you an idea to the games theme.
Here is a Screen:

I would really like people to test it and see how performance is, any errors, no sound, etc. (should be super fast not a much going on)
This is because most of my resource loading and rendering/playing is done here so if this all works, everything in the game will.