Yeah, that's what I had in mind. Get a big enough sample size to give the move with the best probability outcome, for example atomic drop in place versus atomic drop to the right. Or depending on what the enemies do, wait for their movements before performing atomic drop.

There's another little detail thing I'm curious about now.. In stage 2, I've been playing around with spawning the biker early. This is done by defeating the Donovan and the Galsia before scrolling the screen to the right. It looks like it may be just as fast as scrolling right immediately and then waiting for the biker to spawn after defeating all the enemies. Anyone else experimented with this?

Okay, here is what I found so far:

In the savestate I have where the second ninja lines up, if Max just walks right and then turns left to grab the first ninja from behind, and then stays still, the second ninja walks down for a fraction of a second, punches once left and then gets locked in a state where he is punching right. In the one savestate I have where he does not line up for the drop, when max does the same thing, he instead does his somersault six times, three to the right and three back to the left, and after that he gets stuck in the infinite air punch. That's pretty funny to see! He keeps punching the air until the timer runs out. I have not yet got into checking the RAM values for these, but I'll get back and report my findings once I have more.

Thanks all for the responses. Mr. Tomahawk, my experience lines up exactly with what you said about getting atomic drop on both ninjas 0% of the time when starting stage 6 with the cheat code. My thought is to get a number of different save states at the end of stage 5 and try to compare the RAM values to see if there is some possibility that I could find a pattern about when the second ninja comes down and lines up for the atomic drop. Not sure if this is viable, but it can't hurt to try!

I am currently playing Max in hardest and mania difficulties, more so in mania. So far I do not have any real-time runs to post. I have been practicing and recording using the emulator's movie feature, and taking little breaks, so the real time is much slower than in-game time in the emulator movie. If and when I get to the point of uploading runs, I will set up to get webcam recordings of real-time play. Rough goals now are to get hardest time down to about 45 minutes (now it's taking about 55 minutes) and just be able to get through to the end on mania.

Hello all, I am new here.

I am wondering if there are some strats that can be used to get the ninjas at the very begnning of stage 6 to line up for max to get an atomic drop on both of then. I once tried it using a savestate, but never got it, wondering if RNG would not allow it or what.

I really enjoy the guides that can be found on here, hope we can make some more of them for the later levels, because that's where I and probably others need a lot of improvement. I plan to contribute what I learn about the game when the time is right :)