To this day, I STILL find nothing wrong with "Minimum system requirements" on the side of PC game boxes. If someone is too much of a fuck-wit to know if they are able to play Crysis on their PC, will they even know how to play it or install it? Or howabout effectively managing the computer?
I do, for the simple reason that I got burned repeatedly with it.
My old system was just under a couple of the
recommended requirements for Oblivion and matched it in other ways (Oblivion recommended a P4-3.0, 1GB of RAM, GeForce 6800; my old system has a P4-2.8, 1GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6600GT). The "required" hardware is only a P4 2.0, 512MB of RAM, and a "128MB Direct3D compatible video card." Basically, they're saying that you can allegedly run Oblivion with a GeForce FX.
It was unplayably slow. Even with everything turned down as far as it can possibly go the system couldn't maintain a stable, or even playable framerate. It was okay when walking around, but it would drop down to as low as 5-10fps whenever more than a single enemy would come on screen. Oblivion even manages to cause my new system to stutter occasionally, moreso than Crysis!
Black & White also fucked me over several years ago. When that came out, my system was well over the recommended requirements. The game slowed down so badly at some points that, if I were to guess, it wasn't pushing more than 10fps. What's worse, B&W relied on mouse gestures. It was literally impossible to do them with low framerates.
Nothing like having to wait several years to be able to play games because the developers/publishers flat-out lie on the back of the box.
Thankfully, not all companies are sleezy with their system requirements. Quake and Quake II both "required" a Pentium to run, yet they ran acceptably on my old 486 (Quake II definitely ran worse than Quake, of course). My laptop has some pretty low-end graphics hardware (RADEON X300) and it was able to run Unreal Tournament 3 at a smooth framerate with the default settings.