[CannonSlugs]

Well it was responsive but it wasn't physically accurate at all, which makes it non-intuitive. The whole reason side-games like KZ and surf could exist was due to the bad physics. I competed in local IRC KZ tourneys and also surfed a lot in 1.6. The fact that you gained speed by moving left and right repeatedly doesn't make any intuitive sense. The surf scene was also heavily infected with frame-rate tricks (hotkeys to increase fps-limit in the air, and then lowering it on the ramps) since you floated more in the air the higher your FPS was. In the beginning you needed to have a PC that could support 250+ FPS to be a high-end surfer. This was fixed later with server-set fps limits etc. though.

It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.

I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.