The first tunnel in Dangerous Holiday is faster, and easier. The move order in Count Down gives me a setup to always hit the tank from behind without risk. I prefer the back groups of hostages in Panic Ocean for safety, because the setups to kill the turrets is easy, and so much of the run rests on (Mental) Breakdown Darkstar.

For Breakdown Darkstar I'm keeping the bomb because firing it adds just enough lag to inch forward at a downward angle towards the first group of hostages, who otherwise are a giant pain to manage. The aggressive setup allows you to do a tailspin-recover if you fail and crash down, and you can go for the lowest hostage first then come back to the top group and save a cycle over grouping the other way. Saving a change to the machine gun for the second phase also prevents a bug where changing at the beginning can sometimes spawn a bugged tile in front of you that kills you if you run into it. On the second phase in the tight cavern, there's one pixel where you're touching the big stalagmite that works, otherwise you want to push down by any amount and you'll get shot-collision on the turrets to the right.

Generally there are times I use ladder-cancels or shots to do some lag control, it especially helps in Fire Storm. You always want to shoot in each level to avoid a shot bonus, but never in the air during horizontal movement without reason as it slows you down.