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Crazy enough, that strategy really works! Barely got to 1000 by eating ghosts and easily to 5000 using your strategy.

I'd say there is even a (very slight) disadvantage to killing the ghost: As long as it's on screen (and preferably slowed down) you know where it is. Once you kill it, you don't know exactly when and where it will reappear.

Interestingly, the points you get for a kill are NOT tied to how many ghosts you've killed before. They only depend on the speed of the ghost, which in turn depends on your overall score.

So I think one addition to the strategy would be to try to keep the ghosts alive as long as practical early on, then start hunting them when you have, say, 1500+ points and kills can actually give a significant bonus.

The ghost always goes to the further side and spawns as soon as it reaches the end

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

High score: 50060

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

58764!

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.

Mostly following your advice, I got 14257. I found if I could easily eat the ghost, it was worth taking a few extra steps to go for it. The real key is knowing you can successfully leave 6 on either side to carefully pick up after getting the middle.

YES! I play this way even with the original version on Atari, as well as all of the various other 8-bit versions (Ms. Pac Man, Super Pac Man, Pac Man Jr., etc.)

11,800 with a multiplier of 40 ;D It's really all about the endgame knowing when how to manipulate the ghost's position. Sometimes it's worth it to wiggle back and forth until the ghost gets close to you in the middle to be able to get the dots on the edge. But yes once you pick up the power-up you need to pick up the middle dots.

25923. I'm going to bed now.

Ok I reached 19,098 and I think it'd take a lot of time to improve that. It gets too fast at level 50 for my mortal reaction-time.

I suppose the score limit is infinite if you never die to the ghost so that seems like a good strategy.

Okay, after 30 mins of attempts, I managed to get 8600. I could probably go higher if I tried.

Yes, I figured this out too. Not eating the ghost is the right play.

Ghosts, betcha can't eat just one.

Came here to say 520 (；・∀・)

Heh. My first or second game, I just happened to get like 650 points. And then spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out what the hell I had done. Turns out you can sometimes get into a rhythm where you don't even have to turn for a while and score a lot of points.

OP's score is just ludicrous.

Is the upside down A supposed to be a bird's beak?

If you’re on iOS, add the Japanese keyboard and hit the lower left most key, then expand autocorrect to get a big array of such emoticons.

Sweat smile it is supposed to be…

it's a smile