It took a bit of practice, but I finally cleared the Circus area (AKA the first area out of, I believe, four) in Aero the Acro-Bat on Super Nintendo. I can rack up lots of lives, but I also blow through them fast with the instant-death spikes that are everywhere in this game. Given the length of these stages, it's just beyond stupid that there's no way to continue your game after turning the system off, so I'll definitely be using the stage select code. I don't know if it can take you to any specific stage or just the first stage of an area, but I only plan to use it for the latter. Once I can clear an area without using any continues (they're not that helpful anyway; they take you all the way back to the first stage of the area) and without dropping below 5 lives in reserve (the default you start with), I'll use the stage select code to skip that area since it doesn't given me any advantage at that point (it's a disadvantage, in fact, since I could be stockpiling lives on those early stages) besides saving all the time I'd spend tediously doing the same stages over and over. And I already managed that with the Circus area (beat the boss with 6 lives in reserve), so I'll jump straight to the Funpark next time.