Streets of Rage 2 New Era: testing new MegaMania strat with Blaze

I wanted to get a nice, clean demo of this new approach to the end of stage 6... But I figure 1 failure followed by 3 straight sloppy/awkward successes is arguably a better way to show the strat is viable.
If you look at stage 6 in my current MegaMania pb, you'll see that I take an intentional time out death at the end of the wave before Souther in order to pull just Souther by himself and finish him without any other enemies spawning:
• Streets of Rage 2 New ...
That made the final two waves take 3:17, which is pretty consistent. But with this new approach, where I take an intentional death early in the Souther fight instead, which resets the timer on the additional Zamza clones spawning, it's possible to get those waves down to at least a low 2 minute time. So we can save a full minute!
I figured out the spawning mechanism being tied to the life/wave timer of the game by watching my friend Prox make attempts at beating MegaMania. Catch him live here:
/ prox_pl

[@hahhah42speedruns]

I figured out the spawning mechanism being tied to the life/wave timer of the game by watching my friend Prox make attempts at beating MegaMania. Catch him live here:
www.twitch.tv/prox_pl
Additional thoughts:
The second Zamza clone spawns with around 78 or 79 on the timer. It seems that the first Jet is tied simply to actual time passed, not the wave timer, as you can see in the final demo. So he's always going to be something to deal with when you use this approach. That said, since you don't take the intentional death in the previous wave, it's possible for this strat not to cost any additional lives, which is very important when routing this difficulty!