Those videos are great! We actually figured the Mikey trick out back in the day by accident because we always played by the rule that letting Mikey get killed got you a punch in the arm. When someone was feeling cocky, he would just circle around Mickey and we finally saw the behavior of the brains.
One thing I love about Robotron is that there are no patterns in the game to memorize. When you get killed, you always see it coming and usually know what got you in that spot in the first place. A couple of general tips are:
(1) With the tanks and spheroids, the farther you are away from them the faster the bullets come at you. The general reaction in tank waves and those with lots of hatched spheres is to get away from them. In reality, getting close to them makes them much easier to handle. You can circle right around a group of spheroids and never get hit. In tanks waves where you fail to kill the cubes before the tanks hatch, run right through the middle of the screen and take out as many tanks as you can before getting to a wall and picking off the remainders.
(2) When dealing with spheroids, don't run along the outer wall. Stay just a bit off of it instead. The bullets will travel along the walls so you can avoid a lot of them by doing this.
(3) Grunt waves (9,19,29, etc.) are probably the hardest ones because if you die early you will most often lose several more lives quickly after. When the wave is forming, look up and down and find your best path to the wall. Get there at all costs as quickly as possible. Don't worry about picking up people, just get to the wall and then go left or right, whichever way doesn't have a hulk in your way. If you run a grunt wave, you will get plenty of people near the end to get an extra man or two.
Dave