Unfortunately this doesn't surprise me too much. I'm a Mac user and eagerly awaited the Mac release, only to find it had terrible performance and game breakage bugs. I emailed the developers and received two replies.
Tommy, the developer quoted here, started his email implying my complaint was faked, then saying they couldn't reproduce the issue of the game crashing every time you entered a warp zone, although they said they were working on it. His response made me quite a bit madder.
Edmund, the other developer, replied separately. He was apologetic and mentioned that the person they had originally paid to port the game fell through so it had to be done very fast. This was the kind of email I was expecting. It wasn't confrontational at all.
They later released a patch that fixed the crashing issues, but performance is still a major problem. The Windows system requirements are listed as a 1.4 GHz P4 with 768 MB of RAM. On the official blog, they list a dual core 2.6 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM as the minimum requirements for the Mac. The game is officially supposed to support the 360 gamepad, but a note was left on the Steam forum that despite the promise it's not possible to support it correctly on the Mac, so the problem won't be fixed.
I thought the binding of Isaac looked interesting, and it has been getting good reviews. But after my experience I'm not going to play it. Super Meat Boy was a lot of fun (even though it didn't perform well on my Mac), but after my experience seeing the response to this issue doesn't surprise me.
I considered buying it on XBLA a few times, but I wanted to support a developer for supporting the Mac, and I didn't want to have to boot my XBox to play it.
The individual levels are generally quite fluid, unless you die an awful lot of times. But the map screens and some of the bosses are slower (ESPECIALLY the one in World 4/Hell). I wonder if it's the extra visual effects (like the fire in Hell).
I wish I had bought it on XBLA. Microsoft's quality control meant it would have been a much better experience. I was actually disappointed with Steam, which is the first time that happened. I guess I assumed they ran strong QC, which they must not.
PS: MacBook Pro, early 2010, 2.53 GHz, 8 GB. Graphics card (integrated vs nVidia) never seemed to make a difference.
Tommy, the developer quoted here, started his email implying my complaint was faked, then saying they couldn't reproduce the issue of the game crashing every time you entered a warp zone, although they said they were working on it. His response made me quite a bit madder.
Edmund, the other developer, replied separately. He was apologetic and mentioned that the person they had originally paid to port the game fell through so it had to be done very fast. This was the kind of email I was expecting. It wasn't confrontational at all.
They later released a patch that fixed the crashing issues, but performance is still a major problem. The Windows system requirements are listed as a 1.4 GHz P4 with 768 MB of RAM. On the official blog, they list a dual core 2.6 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM as the minimum requirements for the Mac. The game is officially supposed to support the 360 gamepad, but a note was left on the Steam forum that despite the promise it's not possible to support it correctly on the Mac, so the problem won't be fixed.
I thought the binding of Isaac looked interesting, and it has been getting good reviews. But after my experience I'm not going to play it. Super Meat Boy was a lot of fun (even though it didn't perform well on my Mac), but after my experience seeing the response to this issue doesn't surprise me.