So, like I said, I have had 4 kill screens in all: the first on MAME in December 2011, the second "live" at a nearby arcade in September 2012 (after dying on 1-1, which I've now mentioned here and there too many times and will stop mentioning it), the third on my machine about a month later in October, and now this one with the D2K/high save kit, which makes me happy, because now it's there forever.
I went with the same strategy I did for the other kill screen on my machine: start at million-point pace until the first death, then switch to top-hammer only.
My first death came on L6 conveyors and I said "what the heck, this run is so shallow at this point I might as well keep up the double-hammers for a while."
When I started 8-3, after a bad conveyor, I was only at 271K and decided that my pace was so bad (975K or so) that I might as well just run boards and try to get a 900K kill screen.
Nothing much else interesting to say. My conveyors were nasty (all 3 of my deaths were on conveyors - L6, L10, and L14), and my rivets were kind. I kept my last guy going for 47 screens so that's always nice.
I blew it on the kill screen. I wanted to do what Jeff did on his at the KO2, where he backjumped the first barrel before smashing it and the second and got 800 kill screen points (something that never even occurred to me as being possible until I saw him do it), and got so fixated on it that I didn't notice Kong throwing the last barrel! If I hadn't been screwing around I could have gotten THREE smashes for the super-elusive 1000 point kill screen. Oh well.
As it turned out, I only smashed the barrel I backjumped (because I forgot to steer the other one, like a bonehead), missed the wild barrel smash by a mile, and ended up with a 500 point kill screen. Tried to show off and got totally owned.
I'm looking forward to the tournament next month. At a Kong Off I know that I'd have no shot whatsoever of coming anywhere near the the top 5, even if I had a dedicated machine, but I think I'm right in the wheelhouse with the average level of skill in the wildcard field. I'll just have to break Ross's keyboard first.
EDIT: I changed "hands" to "keyboard." Even as a joke it just didn't sit right!