Hey all, thanks for all the positive feedback.
jxq2000: You don't need to press up+down to fire the multi-warheads upwards. You need to hold up for 9 frames to get your tank to fire normal shots upwards. Once your aiming upwards you simply need to hit down+fire to trigger the multi-warheads to fire upwards. This might be difficult to do while playing normally but doesn't require pressing up and down simultaneously.
As far as breaking the sequence of the game goes, you would need to complete at least level 3 in order to get the crusher beam to destroy the blocks in level 8 to reach the boss dungeon. However, I haven't found a way to skip any of the levels. The closest I came was a shortcut for level 7 by enterting an earlier dungeon in the first overworld room and using invulnurability to walk over lava to the boss's room, but there just isn't enough invulnurability time to walk over the lava. I spent 3 days trying to make it and I came was this:
http://www.uofr.net/~namflow/LavaShortcut.jpg
I noticed that if you pause the game it resets you from invurnurability state to normal state. Thus, to get that far, I began to walk on the lava and paused it while I was on the lava, but still in the hit box of an enemey on the ledge. Even this didn't give me enough time to safely reach the ledge on the right. You can't get hit by a bullet mid-lava to extend your invulnurability time (even by pausing) because if you are in a bullet's hit box but invulnurabable the bullet will disappear. Thus it is impossible to pause the game while getting hit by a bullet to reset your invurnurability buffer because the bullet will disappear before you pause it.
yrsimys: I'm glad I finished this too. Just by watching it I knew my previous run could be improved, and I think this run is a lot better looking (not to mention faster.) I'd love for some competition though if you want to try another go at it! :)
