Civilization IV: OS X

I’ve had my fair share of ups and downs with the PC version of Civ IV (“Sid Meier’s Civilization IV” (2K Games)), but after a couple of patches and a stellar expansion pack, my issues with that game are at least no longer technical. The game works pretty-well, in my experience, and most of the crashes I hear about are from friends running dubious versions of the software, operating system or what have you. This is easily my most-played game of the last year.

So, it was with some enthusiasm that I decided to pony-up another forty of my hard-earned Nintendo bucks for Aspyr’s recently-released port. The thought of taking the time to backup the contents of my hard-drive, repartition the hard-drive, boot camp my system and then install a separate XP partition on my flashy Apple hardware made me kind of queasy. The game was worth it in saved time alone.

Or so I thought!

After turning up my graphics settings, I began my first game. After several turns, it inauspiciously crashed. Now, I’m a reasonable man. I was running a few things in the background that were fairly greedy with the memory. I had cmd-tabbed back out to the desktop a couple of times. Maybe this was considered rude in video gaming on the mac, something I am not used to doing. I shut down a few apps and tried again. Crash. I submitted my report to Apple.

How is this acceptable? On which systems was this game tested? Apparently I exceed all recommended system requirements for portable computers, so this shouldn’t be an issue.

I know writing software is complicated. Writing a port of a complex piece of software is also complicated. Knowing everything about the target computer you’re writing for is impossible. It is a complex ecosystem of differing pieces of software, some of which you expect to be there in a particular state and these expectations are not always met. Software companies are forced to ship pre-required components if they can’t be guaranteed they will exist on the target computer. Sometimes, due to licensing restrictions, this isn’t possible, so they must be rewritten…

This is all well-and-good. I know it’s hard. But goddamnit, if I plop down $40 of my hard-earned Nintendo bucks, I’d like at least some assurances that the game will work on my high-end computer. If it doesn’t work, I want my money back. Plain and simple.

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