Well, it's a more original than having Doc Croc spawn flashing Throw Blocks.
Also, it's
very difficult to get a hang of the boss.
I understand that Doc Croc is kind of Norveg's 'Dragon', aka the powerful, dangerous henchman in charge of most of the things that Norveg doesn't deal with, but dang, if he's this hard, I have a
bad feeling on the final battle's difficulty (and that's not counting an eventual W9 true final boss).
Don't get me wrong, the boss
plays well and offers a good challenge overall, and there are almost no oversights. But some of his attacks are a bit unfair : I lost a good twenty lives on some.
The worst offender is probably the
homing electricity attack. It's difficult to dodge the first time, but also on all the subsequent tries, and more maddeningly, you risk taking a hit if you try to use the spinboard and jump on him while he's using it. Don't even mention dealing with it along with the homing drone.
Possible fixs : Make it so he only spawns 1 or 2 of these on each salvo, and that he doesn't fire any upward, and perhaps freeze the drone during it.
The Doc's
last-stand-attack is also
insanely terrifying, and I resolved to use a savestate (my only one) so I could try it again and again more quickly. I think you should do one or more of these : prevent electricity from being created atop Doc Croc, remove the additional attacks and/or slow down the firing rate.
That aside, other attacks are more than okay, if not
downright awesome. The normal electricity storm is a cool attack, perhaps a bit stingy on the dodging (it's mostly getting the right spot, of which there are around three, in time, and praying nothing hits anyway) but okay nonetheless.
More general things :
-Perhaps you should use a
custom springboard that doesn't slow the player down when picked up, or downright scrap it as suggested by Punk Sarcophagus, although I think it's currently doing more good than bad.
-Maybe Doc Croc's machine should
not be able to hurt you at all. I mean, it's not that menacing and most of the hits it dishes out are because of a telefrag or unforgiving collisions. Of course you'll be able to hit it more easily from right below, but that's providing you dodge the current attack.
-Trying to spinjump on something should result in you
being knocked away horizontally with no vertical momentum instead of taking damage. At least for the drone.
All my bickering aside,
excellent job, this boss is AAA quality !
(underlined stuff to add clarity)
EDIT : No offense taken. I'm not very good at playing hacks anyway, so bosses... yeah, I prefer them as fair as possible, mostly because I try not to use savestates. Honestly, if the boss was put 'as is' in the hack I wouldn't mind, but I guess that some people are as mediocre (or worse) than me when it comes to the difficult parts of hacks, so I though I'ld offer the feedback of an average, not very skilled player as I guess most betatesters will be experienced with SMW.
I hope people will enjoy this boss more than I did... which is surprisingly quite much !