I'm curious if this is allowed: reaching a level after sacrificing two lives, quitting the level, then using the password to skip back to the level you just reached with full lives. The reason I ask is that I can probably finish a speedrun with someone like Warthog without losing all 3 lives, but it would end up taking over an hour to complete; not really worth submitting. However, if I use Twister, I can use the insta-kill combo as much as I want for super quick level times, but I will most likely lose a lot of lives in the process. Likewise, sacrificing lives with Thumper or Mr. Grimm would refill my specials without having to wait the entire cooldown time for them to regenerate, also saving time (2 specials take 140-160 seconds to regen, while load times between acquiring the password, quitting, and entering a new game with the password would take about a minute). So I wonder if allowing lots of deaths and just adding extra time for the extra load times that would result from quitting would be a viable strategy that's allowed. It might require less skill than going through a no-death run, but could add lots of entries with other characters besides Axel. What do you think?

A couple of questions about the rules of the categories for this game:

Why are the SNES categories separate from the Genesis categories? Does one console handle it faster than the other or is there another reason that would make them incompatible with each other? It might be nice if both were combined as categories, but it'd be understandable if there was some difference causing the separation.

More importantly, why do all the categories require playing on the hardest difficulty? I can understand separating the difficulties as categories, but I've never seen an outright ban on all difficulties other than hardest (I think I've seen normal difficulty required on other games, but never hardest). This seems counterintuitive. We want more people to run the game so there's more competition, so why exclude those who play on easier or normal difficulties? I myself would be willing to submit runs for Adventurer (for the absolute fastest possible time, after all, this is a speedrunning website) and Barbarian (for the ending cutscenes) difficulties, but if I'm forced to only submit my Warlord run, it wouldn't be impressive enough to bother. I suggest allowing all difficulties but separating them if necessary.