Yeah that section was the worst… The second time it came up I screwed up by pressing down too early and had to try and recover. Lost quite a bit of time for sure.
Yep, me too. This was constantly the place where I lost my groove.
Great, run @raskulous. You did have a few more opportunities, too. It can always be better … one more try … damn this is such a great score attack game. Also, how much do I love that Dig Dug skin.
Sometimes I seemed to have better luck by not moving past the ghosts and waking them. It appears that there is a bit of randomness as to where newly manifested ghosts will go that you simply can’t account for which often caused me some problems.
Yeah, I noticed you didn’t cut any corners on the two patterns where it’s easiest to do so. I also went back and forth on that and could never seem to get a feel for whether it was better either way.
Also, how cool is that the top 5 or 6 scores are all so close. Nice competition. Glad to be on the board finally.
Yeah I noticed that a guy on YouTube was cutting corners sometimes, I couldn’t seem to really get it to work for me.
One thing you may not realize is that there is a max to the conga line. Eventually ghosts just disappear. You have to chomp the line to get the max points. Timing all that with the need to max your dots/fruits is key.
Huh. Didn’t know that. Key info!
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Man, less than 10% difference to the first place and my “any honest attempt” (I ranked 6th).
Yeah it’s an odd game that way… It pretty much shoe-horns you into a specific pattern, so all the scores are very similar.
It comes down to those little things that can maximize your score in certain situations that will get you more points.
I was trying really hard to do different and unique things with the patterns looking for an edge. I would extend the power pellets for as long as possible. That didn’t seem to work only because I would get myself in different kinds of trouble.
I’m not totally convinced that there isn’t some way to do that and push the score higher, though. I just think my execution always fell short.
I’ve said it before, but I do love this game. We could always do it again down the road and use a different map, too.
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Yeah I was pleasantly surprised, as I never really got into Pac-Man that much. This game is a blast!
I want to see how you guys would be doing with the original arcade 
I was considering suggesting the NES port, which I assume would be the easiest to get and most people already have an NES or a Famicom.
I think all of us reaching above 1.25 million points understand the patterns, demonstrated in @raskulous’ video, must be executed to perfection to reach a higher score. I won’t say that there is NO way to extend points beyond this simple tactic but I don’t see anything obvious outside of maybe skipping some ghosts in order to reach the higher value items (crowns) sooner. Someone would have to take a lot of time to confirm that such a thing would yield more points in the end.
On XBL, the leaderboard has gameplay recordings of the top scores. I wished that the leaderboards split the top scores up by difficulty (beginner, normal, advanced) so that you could see what the known limits of normal difficulty are.
I think I would do terrible. xD
There is one of my scores where I kept the ghost chomping going for over a minute that unfortunately wasn’t in the ones up above. That’s what I was talking about with regard to possibly finding a way to increase scores beyond the 1.6 million threshold that @raskulous hit.
The harder difficulty starts at higher speeds, so I’m pretty certain the really high ones are all on the hardest difficulty.
Yeah that is true, which is why dividing scores by difficulty would have come in handy. :\
Yup, for sure.
Yeah, if I had known that we couldn’t see the leaderboard right, I probably would’ve said play on Expert but that also may have turned some folks off playing.
Normal was a good call, it provided more than enough challenge.