When Rockstar North stated that they had no plans to release the fourth game in the epic Grand Theft Auto series on the PC, fans were outraged. How could Rockstar Games and Take Two allow this travesty to occur? A game series that debuted on the PC should surely be continued on the PC? Eventually, like every other developer, Rockstar conceeded and in early December, Rockstar North released Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC.

In it's first week, it debuted at number 7 on PC game sales. By its second week, it had dropped out of the top ten. The installation process was slow and tedious, requiring you to install the 14gb game, install two online services in the form of Games for Windows LIVE and Rockstar Games Social Club, configure both accounts with profile information, link your GFWL and RGSC accounts together, load the game, go through SecuROM authentification and then finally get into the game, only to have to log into GFWL in-game before you can play. Some people didn't get this far, with a significant amount of players stating that the game crashed before they got to the opening cinematic. Others said that when they did get in game, they were greated with broken graphics, low FPS and generally poor performance from the RAGE engine. A wide pattern emerged: installing and playing GTA IV on the PC is a total pain in the ass, especially if you are one of the significant portion of people who can't actually run and/or play the game afterward.

My system isn't poor. I have a fast dual core, 4gb DDR2 RAM and a 4870 all overclocked to get the best performance out of them without frying them. I can run Assassins Creed, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect on full settings without any noticable FPS drop or engine problems. Now, these may not have the top graphics out there, but they are comparable to GTA IV, so when I loaded GTA IV, I expected to have little problem with it. I tried to set my Texture Detail to high, only to find out that you needed a graphics card with at least 700mb video memory for the highest texture setting. I had to settle for medium. I set everything else to fairly respectable levels. I'm not a fool. I know what my machine is capable of outputting and I settled for just underneath the line of no return. Sadly, things didn't go quite according to plan so I had to drop draw distances for everything right down to 1 in order to suffer no FPS problem. On top of that, the game seemed to be suffering from persistent memory leaking of the most foul kind. One to two hours into the game and textures would start to load slowly as I drove over them. Cars would seemingly be chopped in half by big grey squares as I drove around the roads at medium to high speeds. For Joe Bloggs who isn't too obsessed with perfection, perhaps you will be able to look past these faults and happily game.

I chose to look past them for as long as I could.

And then the most unfortunate thing happened to me. And quite a few other people for that matter.

I was just about to do a mission for a gangster friend of mine when I noticed that the loading screen had been up for a rather long time. I waited... and waited... and nothing happened. So I thought it may have something to do with the memory leak. So I booted down my PC and powered it off at the wall to clear the RAM. I rebooted and reloaded GTA, went back to the mission loading screen, finger crossed. And I waited... and waited... and waited... and once again, nothing happened. Throughout, the game is littered with headscratching inconsistencies like this that make you wonder how they could have got it right in one place, or several places and then got it horribly wrong in another place. 

Now, I know what you are thinking: surely GTA IV is fun and has a brilliant story and brilliant characters. You would be totally correct to think this, as it does. If you want to read a review that goes on and on and on about how brilliant GTA IV is and how much we'd like to have sex and procreate with it if it had genitals, feel free to head on over to any of the mainstream reviewers, such as IGN, Gamespot, PC Gamer, PC Zone etc They all seem to have overlooked the blantantly obvious short comings. I wonder why that would be........... I'm not here to review. It is these reviewers that are lording Grand Theft Auto 4 as one of the greatest PC games ever to be released but... WHY? It's blantant short comings, performance issues, dependencies and DRM all make for one hell of a daunting initial experience with the title and the ongoing experience isn't perfect. To me, that takes away at least 1 out of 10. On top of that, the story is good but not brilliant. There are better story games out there. The only thing going for it is that it is the only half decent crime-based sandbox action game out there. What else do we have? The Godfather and Saints Row? LOLOLOLOLOLOL! 

Rockstar North have made a classic mess with Grand Theft Auto IV by releasing a game that clearly wasn't ready for release. GTA IV needed more time to be refined for the PC before it hit shelves. It needed less dependencies such as Games for Windows LIVE and Rockstar Games Social Club, both of which are stupid ideas. It needed to be rid of SecuROM, which proved its effectiveness with SPORE, which is now the most downloaded game of 2008. The fact that GTA IV has done so poorly on the PC sales front isn't too surprising. I wish I had asked my gf to get me Prince of Persia for Christmas now.

Rockstar will probably release a statement saying that piracy is responcible for the low sales, either directly or by proxy; they wouldn't have to but SecuROM on their games if naughty, spotty teenagers weren't stealing their IPs, which in turn would mean that more people would be buying the games, meaning that piracy is responcible no matter which way you come at it. They will then say that it is now too costly to release games on the PC and they will be going console exclusive, at which point Microsoft will wave the GFWL contract and say, "no you aren't."

Here's an idea: why don't you release a GOOD GAME ALL ROUND rather than putting out a good game with a steaming **** engine..? Or am I just mad?

Update:

The perpetual loading bug that has been effecting a large amount of players appears to be solvable by what a poster on the GTAForums called a, "simple reinstall." I hate to be a whiner... well no, I don't... but GTA IV has one of the most painful installation processes I have ever had to go through. It's hardly a, "simple reinstall." On top of that, Rockstar has, "cut to the chase," and stated that the problems most people are having are due to their systems being underspec, which isn't the case for me or my friends that have purchased the game and run into problems. In fact, I browsed several forums, to find that a large portion of the posters complaining about problems were well in spec for GTA IV. Talk about passing the buck. Rockstar have however stated that patches are incoming to fix not only the errors reported on initial release but also to fix the errors they create with the patch that was supposed to fix the errors reported on intial release.