>>11828809Clunky is the word I'd use to describe the Russian 1895 Nagant revolver because it has an awkward and fiddly handling for reloading which is comically behind its time (along with the world's heaviest fucking trigger).
Compare to the famous Colt Peacemaker, which set the bare baseline for this in 1873, then various revolvers by Smith & Wesson, Galand, Webley, Merwin & Hulbert, etc, which were smooth and lightning fast compared even to the Colt.
Taking this back to videogames, clunky to me typically is how I describe something which handles particularly awkwardly in a way which I feel is considerably behind its contemporaries, ergo, most everyone else was doing these things much better at the same time and so this thing was needlessly inferior and unrefined.
Ironically though, the best example I can think of regards a game which I love and which is mostly very fast, smooth, and precise. Doom, a game which was cutting edge in 1993.
Doom was built for mouse and keyboard, horizontal input with the mouse is used for horizontal turning, smooth and excellent, but vertical input with the mouse translates to forward and backwards movement, which is fine for Wolfenstein 3D (great, even, I love it in that game), but for Doom this kind of input handles and feels like complete shit, actually robbing you of smoothness and precision in looking and moving.
Everyone in the world agreed that this is the case, thus why virtually nobody plays Doom with the vertical movement input, back in the 90s people would use programs like NOVERT.exe, and all the fan sourceports and the official new ports lets you disable that input, so you can have perfectly clean horizontal turning which doesn't jitter the player back and forth.
