Thanks for the congrats. I've actually decided to keep practicing a bit, because I was surprisingly close to the world record score. Actually, according to Twin Galaxies, I beat the record they have listed by a good 200,000 points, although I don't believe they allow turbo to be used; normally I think of turbo as cheating, except on TG16/PCE, because the freaking stock controllers have turbo switches. I mean, nobody's at a disadvantage if literally everyone's controller has the turbo switches,
But, yeah, there's some video of a guy playing on Wii Virtual Console and getting 1,384,450 points which claims to be the world record, and I know if I actually apply myself, I can get well past that score. I mean, we're only talking a difference of ~75,000 points - very, very doable.
EDIT: Watching this video and paying a bit more attention, he's playing on the "difficult" mode, so maybe that means my score's already valid in some sense. Either way, I know it's easy enough to beat this score in standard gameplay based on my own performance, so I'm still going for that.
Pretty sure I could do it without turbo as well, but I'll need to try sometime (and look further into whether or not it's allowed by Twin Galaxies; I know it generally isn't allowed, but TG16 seems like it
could be the system where they make an exception). I refused to use turbo on any controllers for pretty much my entire life because it seemed cheap, and only in the past year or so have I begun really letting myself use it in TG16 games based on the logic that if they made a game for the system, they knew people would use turbo switches because every controller has them.