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Best
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Bouncing balls drop from above. Aim a vertical harpoon to pop them — every hit splits a big ball into two smaller ones until they pop into nothing. Don't let any ball touch you.
Touch anywhere in the arena and slide your finger left or right: your robot walks toward your finger at its top speed (about one and a half screen widths per second), so it can never jump straight through a ball. Every new touch fires a harpoon straight up from wherever the robot is standing at that moment, not from your finger. A second finger fires without changing where the robot walks. Only one harpoon can be out at a time.
The harpoon rises to the ceiling and stays pinned there for about two thirds of a second. Its whole length, from the robot to the tip, pops balls. A rising harpoon is used up by the first ball it hits, but a pinned one keeps popping every ball that touches it until it fades. A big ball splits into two medium balls, a medium into two small ones, and a small ball vanishes. Pops are worth 10, 25 and 50 points, and clearing a wave adds 100.
If a ball touches the robot you lose one of three lives, the wave starts again from the beginning, and the points you scored during that attempt are taken back. When the last life goes, your score is what you had at the start of that wave. Later waves bring more balls and faster sideways speed.
Shoot ahead of the ball, not at it. A ball keeps the same sideways speed all the way across the arena and only reverses at the side walls, and the harpoon pops along its whole length, not just at the tip. So stand where a ball is heading and fire early: the ball walks into the shaft on its own, whatever height it is bouncing at.
Let the harpoon reach the ceiling first. A rising harpoon stops at the first ball it touches, but a pinned one keeps popping for about two thirds of a second. When a ball runs into a pinned harpoon, the half that heads back toward the shaft reaches it again a moment later and is popped too, and so can its own halves, so one well-placed shot often chains two or three pops.
Mind where the halves go. A split sends the two new balls sideways in opposite directions at nine tenths of the parent's speed, with a lower bounce: big balls bounce to about two thirds of the arena height, medium to half and small to about a third. Small balls hop low and are easy to walk into, so clear them before you cross under them.
Dying late in a wave is the most expensive mistake. A lost life restarts the wave and takes back everything you scored in that attempt, so a wave that is three quarters cleared is worth playing safe for. The robot can walk the whole width in well under a second, which is far faster than any ball, so the real danger is being boxed in between two balls: keep an escape side open and do not stand in a corner while a ball is coming back from the wall.