It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal
I think this has a lot to do with it. A lot of these platforms have defaukts or even jusy tendencies baked into the development process. It takes an experienced developer to dive in the “feel”.
For making the first Spyro game, Insomniac hired a NASA engineer who had experiencing making flight control systems in order to dial in the feel of controlling Spyro. That’s the kind of thing that costs a lot of money, but made the game one of the most successful 3D platformers of all time.
Another thing to look at is assets. Models, textures, fonts, UI design, sound design. It’s easy to go cheap here: free asset libraries or cheap ones available for purchase. Some of these assets might be fine on their own, but when combined together they’re just…slightly… Off. Because they weren’t designed to be cohesive in a space together. Making one model that looks good takes talent and time. Making thousands of models that look good together takes planning, coordination, and direction.
And these are a lot of things that are easy for a small team to overlook, or at least de-prioritize. Smaller teams are usually driven by game designers who have specific designs in mind. They want to tweak numbers or implement systems. They design the game first, and then slap on whatever art assets they can to make it appealing enough to their audience.
I purchased the Powkiddy RGB10Max back in 2021. I think it was something like $100 or $150 and came with a 128GB microsd card. That included and operating system plus tens of thousands of games.
Based on some recommendations online, I made my own SD card using RetroOz as the operating system instead. It is better, but i’m not sure if was a big enough improvement that it was worth the effort.
People also recommended that I find my own Roms elsewhere, but that really wasn’t necessary. Sure, some of them are Romhacks (modified versions of existing games that are obviously wrong, like Sonic64). But for thr most part they are just legitimate games for these old systems that you could have bought cartridges for in a store back in the 80’s and 90’s. The problem is the same problem we face today on tbe Switch eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam: a lot of this is cheap junk.
Mine came with, as far as I can tell, the complete North American libraries for the Atari 2600, Master System, Genesis, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and N64. It also came with smaller selections of games for PSP, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameGear and Nintendo DS. Plus a smattering of arcade games, and games for other systems i’m less familiar with (Intellivision, Colecovision, TurboGrafx, Wonderswan, SG-1000, PC-9800, MXS, etc).
By upgrading tk a 256gb card I was also able to add my own PS1 collection that I ripped from discs. I pirated a full collection of the Nintendo DS library, plus more games for Dreamcast, PSP, and Saturn. I added Phillips CDi and Atari Jaguar games too. I also used a second SD card to Ru LineageOS, a version of Android, which I used for Steam Link. This allowed me to stream from my desktop for pretty much any Steam game, plus non-steam games like emulators for PS2, PS3, WiiU, Switch, etc.
The whole experience was… Okay. The analog sticks were tiny. It only has 1 speaker. The shoulder buttons sucked. The screen was only 480p. Sleep mode didn’t really work, and it takes like 4 minutes to turn the system on. Eventually the Wi-Fi and one of thr USB ports stopped working.
I am sure things have improved since then. I got a Steam Deck and have barely touched my RGB10 since. I don’t regret the purchase though.