Minor note: Pausing the game resets the in-game tick counter, so by repeatedly pausing and unpausing, you can let the ships progress along their tracks while keeping the populations and AI frozen.
A nice old game; I did find one other exploit besides freezing the grinder.
If you activate Stopwatch or Mr. Gear, you can swap out of it and still get its effects until your power runs out. It isn't very helpful until after a loop or two, when you make more energy than you could otherwise use even without the Randomizer, but is still worth noting.
If you're having trouble with the CRITICAL training, keep an eye on the dummy's peg and only attack when he jumps - he stays on the ground while faking you out.
While the star mechanic is more interesting than "destroy every single enemy while not getting hit ever", the lack of autofire toggle means that getting too powerful can kill bosses before all five stars drop. That, combined with a large amount of lag on level 20 and a bug where I passed the right edge of the stage and softlocked the game on level 15, means this gets a 3/5.
A decent game, but in addition to the various flaws mentioned earlier, both the Glide ability and the "gun" style weapon (such as Boomer's firecracker) have some issues. For instance, the little lift at the beginning of a glide means that with a bit of skill, some double jump challenges (like rescuing Kingsley, L5C2) can be completed with a glide, and the firecracker is much better at harming certain bosses (not needing to jump on the final boss to make him vulnerable), but much worse at harming others (the cheese-dropping saucers are weird)
This is definitely an improvement on the already solid previous versions, but still has a few parts where you can polish it better.
In particular, I'd suggest giving more information in general - the specific range of damage you could deal, how much damage 'resistance' takes off, the speed of an enemy you're looking at, the duration of poison... Whether you have a separate "guide" or just show more information about on-screen characters, it'd definitely help cut down on ambiguity.
I managed to complete the game without another softlock (at least one of Miss Marghle's first clues can be skipped, and is required for two others), but needed to look at the walkthrough to get 100%. I think you should at least have an empty clue spot or two to let people know they should keep poking around the penultimate room.
I'm pretty sure I managed to softlock my game - I reached the ending puzzle with all clues except for the three SURROUNDING the top-left invitation clue, which left me with four total deaductions that didn't form a conclusion in any combination and three pieces of evidence that couldn't form any conclusions. Replaying isn't too much of a hassle, but it still shouldn't be possible.
My god, you were totally right. That was a huge flaw in the design, so I've corrected it immediately by adding a little convo that won't allow you to proceed to the secret room unless you have at least all the mandatory clues to form a deduction. You also gave me an idea for future games, so I really thank you for your feedback!
I think the final boss's bug might occur whenever he tries to leave his arrow-shooting phase; I kept track of what he did for a few fights, and he was completely normal up until his arrow-shooting phase, at which point he spawned in twice in rapid succession. I couldn't tell for certain in the chaos, but I assume that every time he leaves an arrow phase, another iteration of him appears. It's theoretically possible to beat him by using the Wizard and hoping to get invincibility before dying, but that'd take some pretty good RNG and/or selective purchasing.
I've put in a temporary fix, but I think you're onto something with the root problem. His arrow behavior is a little wonky when I play the game in Chrome (I did most of my testing in Firefox). Something or another is causing his bow phase to last longer in one browser than another, which is... kind of bizarre, but it's a start to a concrete answer at least.
In case anyone is confused by the solidity of walls: One-way surfaces (walls, floors, ceilings) block bullets only in the directions they block movement, but they don't block you (or enemies) sticking your gun barrel through them - so you can always shoot upwards through one-way ledges, but you can only shoot downwards through ledges you're standing on.
The tricky part is that there aren't actually any two-way walls, only one-way surfaces surrounding a "solid" texture. Because of that, if you stand right next to that massive wall blocking you off from a different part of the level, you can blast the creatures on the other side with impunity... unless they're standing right next to the wall too.
It's not very intuitive and not explained in-game, so I'll just mention that the words can be scored by taking each individual letter and adding its value to all the letters after it. This means that high-scoring letters at the start of words are much more valuable than if they were at the end - so WOE is worth 4 + (4+1=5) + (4+5+1=10) = 19 points, but OWE is only worth 1 + (1+4=5) + (1+5+1=7) = 13 points.
On the one hand, this makes certain words almost arbitrarily more valuable than other words, but on the other, it makes Scrabble word finders a lot less useful on their own.
The display has been reworked to show multipliers for each letter, rather than the chained additions shown previously. The mathematical result is identical though.
Once you get to really high levels, there are ways to earn 100+ clovers, which takes forever to get through. Maybe you could implement some way to feed the mushroom more than once at a time?
 "Earn to Die 2012"){kind=icon}
 "Little Stars for Little Wars: Players Pack"){kind=icon}
 "Versus Umbra"){kind=icon}
 "Swords and Souls"){kind=icon}
 "Bullethell Adventure"){kind=icon}
 "Papa Louie 2: When Burgers Attack!"){kind=icon}
 "Rogue Fable III"){kind=icon}
 "ZS Dead Detective - Rats in a hole"){kind=icon}
 "Ante Hero"){kind=icon}
 "GunBot"){kind=icon}
 "Forest Floor"){kind=icon}
 "Cat Word Poker"){kind=icon}
 "Song for a bird"){kind=icon}
 "SUPERHOTline Miami Deluxe"){kind=icon}
 "Pandemic 2"){kind=icon}
 "The Deepest Sleep"){kind=icon}
 "The Necronomicon"){kind=icon}
My god, you were totally right. That was a huge flaw in the design, so I've corrected it immediately by adding a little convo that won't allow you to proceed to the secret room unless you have at least all the mandatory clues to form a deduction. You also gave me an idea for future games, so I really thank you for your feedback!