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