DKC Kaizo and You
So I play a lot of DKC2 romhacks (and DKC romhacks in general, but the majority of the good ones are 2). You may not have known there are any DKC romhacks at all, which is understandable because the only one that's truly worth a damn is Unveiled, which got run at a GDQ a couple years back. Most of them are garbage and never really got past the "savestate everywhere because it's almost impossible to play them legitimately" phase that every romhacking community goes through; largely because there isn't really a community at all, but that's a story for another time. But the end result is that you inevitably start getting pretty good at these games - you have to in order to make any serious headway into these hacks, whether you're using tools or not.
Now, I'm not a speedrunner by any means, but Unveiled was a big turning point for me because prior to that, I was very much a "savestate and go" player. Once we got to K. Rool's Keep though, I started playing the levels more or less legit? I have no idea why Arctic Abyss of all things was the level that pushed me over the edge, but man, it was like "This is what kaizo DKC could be? I want MORE of this." And ever since I've basically only used states to keep from getting game overs. Still will at times, especially if I'm streaming them because I don't want an audience to watch me fail a level for an hour straight and make no progress, but I play pretty legit these days.
Anyway, I was playing DKC2 IXKZ on stream, and Kreepy Krow is uh... I dunno if broken is the right word, but phase 2 and 3 have the barrel just spawn over a pit 2/3 of the time, so you have to go through multiple cycles. Phase 3 is even worse, because there's nothing other than the nest itself to stand on, and you can't jump over Krow when he swings past. So how do you avoid him? Well, the solution we came up with to roll down away from him as he comes by, then jump back on the platform (then immediately do it again because he goes by twice per cycle). This comes with a few obvious caveats, not the least of which is that you're dancing with the kill plane every time you do this jump, but it does get the job done if you can time it right. Which, after a couple tries, I did about 10 of them in a row while I watched barrels ineffectually fall into the abyss.
Does that idea make this boss fight good? Fuck no, the fight was awful and we're still not entire sure it's even working properly. Hell, Gloomy Gulch as a whole was pretty much hot garbage from start to finish. But in that one moment, everything clicked just right and it was like "This is why I play these games." Someday I'm gonna go back and give Unveiled the playthrough it deserves, along with some of the older, better hacks we've done.