I've noticed that if you die you don't get the timer points after beating the stage. I'm not sure if this actually saves time considering you have to hear the stage jingle again and chase the enemies, but most importantly, I'd like to know if it's allowed to die and if so, how would the end time be determined if this happens on the last stage of the run.

Hi Nick - this is something I didn’t even know about, so thanks for sharing this knowledge with me. I hadn’t taken that into consideration when establishing these rules. If you want try playing around with this strategy, feel free to do so and I will change the rules to account for this.

Maybe I’ll make the stop time when it fades after the last round? Let me know what works best for you.

I don't particularly mind, when I was playing last night I felt I had found something big, but after a while I realized that maybe there's no time save at all, the countdown screen hangs around for a while even with no score, plus listening to the jingle again and chasing enemies, I don't think is of any benefit, and I'm not the kind to go do some frame counting to confirm.

But, if there's any place where it could save time (if it actually does) is the last stage. When you die in Stage 3, the red guy chases directly after you by dropping down once you respawn, and you can easily wait and kill him, and like I said, you get no time bonus, but, it still makes a short sound as if it was counting down the seconds (that you could use as a cue to stop the timer).

If you ask me though, I'd suggest changing the end time to a clear visual cue, not a sound cue, if you have a timer bonus, you can easily see when the time reaches zero, but if you die you'd have to use the sound, and if you ever allow for milliseconds and dying happens to be a good strat, it's gonna be really annoying to get the exact time. So either when the points bonus screen first appears or when it fades to black, or when the "Scene 4/19" screen appears, whichever you prefer.

Did a bit more playing, found out that if you don't pick up the drops from enemies and die, then you get absolutely no points and there's no sound whatsoever on the bonus points screen.