I have now had several games in the 17000s range although I see I’m not the top scorer here anymore. I don’t think I can go any faster without getting to a physical keyboard vs my touch screen!
A couple more notes: I see now that the score multiplier goes up by 1 for every row cleared AND for every ghost eaten. I don’t think this changes much about my recommended strategy except sometimes you can pause or delay to set up a free ghost kill without breaking the originally stated strat and it’s worthwhile to do so.
At very high levels (15000+) I’m finding it necessary to double tap rapidly to induce small pauses to let the ghost catch up. The timing of these pauses is very tough at high speeds. But the gameplay feels almost safer and more formulaic. Not sure if that’s a function of anything changing in particular. It might just be the normal Strat but fast enough that it normalizes. I might try to do this on a keyboard to get them frame perfect pauses going lol
Edit: worth noting my high score went from 7k to 16k in one game without realizing it had been a particularly good game. The scores ramp up very quick late game and it’s not quite as huge of a gap as you might think
The biggest part of my strategy is to do a lot of stutter steps/dash dancing to try and collect the power up as close to the ghost as possible. Doing so is more likely to lead to a sort of "combo" state where your pacman can spawn kill the ghosts without any additional input. Fast reflexes can keep your combo state going if you know when to stutter step and when to turn back around and start comboing again in the opposite direction Getting your game state into such a combo state is even stronger in the late game as your pacman moves so fast it can almost always set up for a lot of safe kills quickly. And additionally, as you pointed out, by getting a ghost kill for every power up you get, you hasten the speed at which you grow your multiplier
Only other observation has been that the common failure mode is screen wrapping while the ghost is fleeing but without enough time to kill him. Don’t do this. Just wait until he is chasing you to screen wrap.
A couple more notes: I see now that the score multiplier goes up by 1 for every row cleared AND for every ghost eaten. I don’t think this changes much about my recommended strategy except sometimes you can pause or delay to set up a free ghost kill without breaking the originally stated strat and it’s worthwhile to do so.
At very high levels (15000+) I’m finding it necessary to double tap rapidly to induce small pauses to let the ghost catch up. The timing of these pauses is very tough at high speeds. But the gameplay feels almost safer and more formulaic. Not sure if that’s a function of anything changing in particular. It might just be the normal Strat but fast enough that it normalizes. I might try to do this on a keyboard to get them frame perfect pauses going lol
Edit: worth noting my high score went from 7k to 16k in one game without realizing it had been a particularly good game. The scores ramp up very quick late game and it’s not quite as huge of a gap as you might think