Yes I did get the idea from Mario! The purple background lines are just to illustrate where the nodes are and to give a few hints. There are no switches involved. It's all one long path, and the snake is made from lots and lots of dots with a delay in between every one.
Did you get these ideas from a Mario game? Because This is a great version of riding on a moving platform from Mario. It's obvious how he did it, those purple backrounds, those were switches and every time the snake hit them it would cause it to go a different way.
Intel 2.4GHz with 512MB ram... fast enough for games like Mafia or even Counterstrike Source. So I don't think this little game here would cause problems. :-)
I still haven't been able to finish it. I think what really makes it hard is the fact that the snake doesn't move swiftly. There is a short delay in its movement from time to time, which makes it ultra hard to survive.
This snake riding thing is obviously not what I'm best at... the first level already took me forever to finish, and it's the same here. Haven't even seen the first save point yet, I'm still in the area with the purple dots in the beginning.