Xbox pad does not work, keyboard controls are terrible and i never figured out how to get out of the help menu.
are you on windows or a different OS, other OS's might have trouble recognising controllers.
if you are on windows, try the button config menu, if your controller doesn't do anything when you try to bind your keys then it's probably your controller driver that isn't properly installed.
and since you say that the keyboard controls are terrible, that means that you probably just skipped the button settings and went with default keys which are very common keys for 90s pc games.
I'm on Windows 10, the game registers the control to skip the intros but does nothing else after that. I havn't touch the control map and when one out of a hundred game doesn't work i hardly think it's my setups fault ;)
The keyboard controls are terrible in the sense that those controls are terrible by themselves and using a keyboard just makes it worst regardless of the key mapping.
That pseudo-nostalgia for the 1995/2001 era has to stop. Games from that era were terrible. They had good ideas, but terribly badly executed because of the limitations of the hardware. Now he have good hardware, devs should take the good of those games and remove the bad, badly bad such as tank controls and aim, and skip the low polly bullshit. The nostalgia for the SNES era if perfectly understandable, 2d graphics were at their best and indie developers have taken advantage of it by using beautyfull pixel art, and taken what we liked from the gameplay of those games while removing the bad parts such as passwords, lives, etc. There should be no nostalgia for the late 90's, the 3d was prehistoric and there were a lot of gameplay issues. I don't see any reason why we have to suffer through that again.
so, it is your button settings. But if you don't like these games, just don't bother playing it.
Many people love these type of games for many reasons. There are also crappy ps1 style games out there but that's a different topic.
1. AAA games now-a-days are a terrible business, they look good but the content is mostly crap or incomplete which was almost never the case in the 90s and early 2000s. People loved that era just because of that. Games were good and the graphics were evolving.
2. if the game's image is vague, not all too sharp, your imagination fills up what it can not see, this creates a way better experience. Same with pixel-art. Same with a black-white movie where after a while you might start to see colors just because you can imagine the colors (you don't literally see it).
3. This game follows all the limitations as correctly as possible an even runs on the cheapest and oldest shit PC on the market just because of that. Probably one of the only 3D games that will be possible to play on anything in the year 2020-2021 and beyond.
But as I said, don't bother playing these games if you don't like it.
I don't know if you actually grew up at that time because there were was even more crap than today. Making games didn't cost that much so pretty much anystudio could publish one and since there was no Internet, we used to pay a lot of money for shitty games. And there was no diffrence between cheap and AAA games, they had the same price tag.
Now, you don't like most of today's AAA games, that a choice altough a lot of them are pretty good, does that mean that you have to make a game shitty for it to be god? Or isn't it that using PS1 graphics as an identity is just convenient for hiding that you are bad at 3d modeling?