runs at a reasonable 30fps on Qubes creaky XP laptop
Are you insulting my 1ghz Celeron beast? lol. Hopefully towards the latter half of the year I'll have enough spare cash to warrant a new laptop (or PC).
Minimum specs have always been a hit and miss target with PC's. Even recommended specs are sometimes below par with what I'd class as "recommended"
To me a "minimum spec" should be enough to make the game work at a perfectly reasonable quality. Not slow and barely playable, but playable at a decent rate. Playable to at least 75% of how it should play.
a "recommended spec" should guarantee the game works perfectly with all the bells and whistles.
Unfortunately, a lot of "minimum specs" are enough to get the game loaded and working but are in fact so juddery and slow they are unplayable. To me, if it performs like that then the minimum specs are definitely inaccurate.
On the flip side, "recommended specs" also have the tendency to mean "just enough to work with some settings set to minimum".
When I was into PC gaming I had a pretty decent system and quite a few games I bought exceeded the recommended system specs but still had to have some setting turned down just to keep things moving at the pace I wanted.
It's a shame that minimum/recommended specs are not always accurate and that was one of the reasons I gave up on PC gaming.