If anyone wants to make a "max score" TAS, I've been trying to theorize the highest possible score in this game. I discovered that it's possible to kill Joker for 80000 points and die at the same time (1-frame trick), allowing you to redo this fight and farm more points. You could also just touch a bullet to die if you want. This is by far the best way to utilize your lives to gain points. The final maximum score I've come to is 1890980 points. Below is a theory video on how to get it.
https://youtu.be/sPIkpNTQbr4
Some notes:
- The lives you collect in levels don't respawn upon death. I haven't found a way to have more than 15 lives (displayed as "F" in the game).
- There might be more invisible blocks in the game left to be found.
- If there are 4/5 enemies on the screen, it will prevent new enemies from spawning.
- Picking up the Bomb powerup will kill enemies on the screen, but won't give points for them.
- The glitchy-looking item we don't collect in any level will decrease power of your weapons. It doesn't give you points, so there's no point in collecting it.
- Some levels have split paths, meaning we can't kill every enemy, can't destroy every block and can't collect every item. The paths that have the most Bonus items are obviously the best choice.
- You get bonus lives at 100k, 200k, 300k, 400k, 500k, 700k and 1m points.
Scoring in this game:
- 10 points for destroying any block
- 10 points for shooting invisible blocks (not sure if I found them all)
- 50 points for killing any enemy
- 100 points for collecting Bat powerup
- 500 points for collecting Bomb (enemies killed with the Bomb don't give you points)
- 1000 points for collecting Weapon
- 5000 points for collecting Bonus
Comments on each level:
1-1: Near the end, if we collect the 5000 Bonus, we can't reach some blocks high up in the sky. We'd need some kind of glitch to jump higher by 1 block to get them.
1-2: Found one invisible block, which isn't even necessary to collect the floating Heart. It's possible to jump on the ceiling, but there's nothing there.
1-3: Found one invisible block, necessary to pick up a life.
1-B: The boss gives much less points than Joker, so we don't farm him for points.
2-1: Found one invisible block, necessary to pick up a Bat powerup.
2-2: Path split: we can't collect one block on the bottom without missing on enemies on top. We have to carefully move forward to prevent enemies on bottom from despawning. We also miss on 1 block on top after falling down to kill the 5 enemies. I haven't found a way to go through upper path without despawning any enemies on bottom.
2-3: First path split: we choose the bottom path, as it contains more Bonus items. I don't think it's possible to kill any enemies from the upper paths. The Bats can't reach them, and we can't manipulate them to fall through the fake floor tiles.
Second path split: we choose the upper path, as it contains more Bonus items. On the bottom, there are a couple enemies to the left of the 2 blocks. I tried my best to find a way to make them go through those blocks by camera manipulation (when an enemy is far enough from the camera, it despawns and respawns a moment later). But couldn't figure it out.
3-1 and 3-2: Would be cool if there was a way to spawn more enemies?
4-1: Found four invisible blocks necessary to pick up a life.
4-2: Not much to say here.
4-3: We die on the same frame as we kill Joker. We kill Joker a total of 19 times for over 1.5mil points.