This gives big “all video game things are ‘a Nintendo’” energy.

Yes, it’s a bad game. You’re allowed to like it anyway, I love it as well. It is charming, and I have fond memories with it, but it has pretty major technical and design flaws. The tag barrel system and the ability to only collect certain collectables as certain kongs (namely the blueprints) adds hours of pointless backtracking. Then there’s also the fact that it barely runs on the n64 and lags all the time. Rare introduced a crude delta time implementation that sped up the player’s movement to compensate, but that causes all kinds of jank and issues with the collision. A common saying in the speed run community is that “walls are optional” in DK64. Now from what I understand, you do have to try to clip through a wall, but not very hard (and I have seen people clip out of bounds accidentally in certain areas as well).

If you must play that game nowadays, I recommend using the “tag anywhere” patch, which lets you switch kongs with the dpad, and the “free trade agreement”patch, which makes it so blueprints and golden bananas can be picked up by any Kong. And play it on Project64. It cuts out most of the lag which circumvents most of that weird speed up jank, in addition to just being a smoother experience.

This is exactly how I feel about DK64. Except I’m aware that I’m delusional and nostalgic and would not leave a recommendation for it lol

Personally, I’ve used interception-tools with the caps2esc plugin. Not the easiest to set up but it allows me to press caps lock for esc and hold it for ctrl. It bypasses the lack of a programs being able to read keystrokes of other programs by intercepting them closer to the hardware level. You can also do lots of other cool stuff with it, but I’ve yet to find anything else that lets caps lock work as both esc and ctrl.

I think this is a Zelda Ocarina of Time reference.

I mean, I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but the Recent Files list can help pick up the slack here. Also Windows typically saves new files to appropriate places and saves edits to existing files in the same place you opened the file at. Not knowing where a file is has never really been a problem I’ve had with Windows. If I have it’s usually been because an individual 3rd party app did something weird.