Does anyone happen to know how often the grocery sack spawns during scavenges?

Was just on pace for a 9 minute PB going into Lava Palaver and the game proceeded to drop an alien into the lava after I jumped. I restarted the mission, and this time whenever I'd get to a lava river, I'd wait until they dropped out of my hands before picking them up again and then jumping over the lava. Unfortunately, even after doing that, the game proceeded to immediately drop one out of my hands as I was jumping over the lava. Sucks to lose such a good run to some seemingly random drop/grip mechanic.

Does anyone have a better idea of what causes the aliens (or really any NPC for that matter) to drop out of your grip? Any way to prevent it?

I might try and re-route the stage so I don't have to jump over any lava, but there is always the one alien on the island that cannot be rerouted - so at least one jump over lava is required.

Is it possible to have a 2 Player 1 Controller category added for the game? Darkarmist and I completed a semi-decent attempt and I wouldn't mind adding it to a board to possibly encourage others to give it a try.

I've been really getting into this speedrun since running a 12-hour challenge on it a few months ago. I played this game so much as a kid and the speedrun has been equally as fun. I honestly wish more people knew about this game!

I wanted to share a few additional skips/tech that I've started implementing in my runs in case anyone wants to try and push their times down a bit further.

Swing Skip (Scene 1): I borrowed this one from the TAS. At the very start of the stage it's possible to switch to Dot fast enough to jump up to the swing, kiss the pigeon, and land on the platform all in one go. This prevents you from needing to wait a cycle and saves about 3 seconds.

Hay Bale Skip (Scene 4): This is a big one. I started playing around with this, because it was something I used to do when I played the game as a kid, but I never knew how I pulled it off. Essentially what you want to do is fall off of the upper ledge to the top left of the hay bale, jump and land on the top right corner of the hay bale, while continuing to hold right, change characters and then mash quick taps of the jump button. This will allow the charcter to jump off the ground and prevent the game from launching the characters off the top of the screen. The game will only send you back to the beginning of the stage if you are sent off the top of the screen. If you can prevent this, you won't get sent back. This skip saves around 13 seconds since you don't have to bother with any of the gravestone pushing or block breaking.

Helicopter Switch Hit (Scene 5): Named "Wacko's Wacky Hammer" by Darkarmist in my chat. Wacko's hammer is able to reach the switch that opens the door at the end of the helicopter room in Scene 5 as long as you swing his hammer at the very top of a full jump. There is no need to pull the box over to hit that switch. This can save about 5-6 seconds.

Anyway - there's about 20-25 seconds worth of time saves for anyone who might want to revisit the game! It doesn't seem like there is much more to squeeze out in terms of time saves, but I'll continue playing around with things and let y'all know what I find!