Hi 9volt and the Ninja Spirit community. I just submitted my first run. Many games start and stop timing around control of the main character. It's a bit tough to stop the timer "at the end of the explosion." Any consideration for stopping the timer on the loss of control of the ninja?

I share Latt's desire to move to a visual cue rather than an audio cue. Frame advance makes it easy to look for visual cues.

Also of note: it is possible to earn an extra life by killing the final boss, in which case the extend fanfare plays over the final explosions, leaving one to guess when the end of the run occurred.

Here are some other visual cues I've seen used in other games:

• final blow to last boss
• fade out (or in this case, perhaps when the protagonist collapses?)

I agree it's tough to stop the timer using the audio cue, and I'm all in favor of changing it to something visual. I never knew the fanfare could change depending on how many lives you had, that definitely makes the timing method even more silly. I think final blow to the boss would also be hard and probably require a lot of re-timings, but it seems the most logical because it'd be the very last input given.

I'm open to talk about things like this regarding the game and I'm sorry for not responding to forum posts earlier. I'm not the most adept at managing a speedrun game so please forgive me.