grand-theft-auto-iv-pc posts

The daily sales over at the Direct2Drive PC game web site are continuing even on a l azy Saturday. From now until 1 pm Eastern time on Sunday you can get two major PC titles for 50 percent off their normal Direct2Drive price.

The first is the PC port of Rockstar Games' open world action game Grand Theft Auto IV which is priced during the sale period for just $9.95. You can also get the stand alone expansion pack Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City for just $14.95. Don't forget that Direct2Drive also has a selection of games priced at just $6 from now until Wednesday.

Steam owners always get a good sale on games during the weekend and this time Valve's downloadable service offers up a number of PC titles that are all on sale for 30 percent off. It's the entire PC catalog from Take Two Interactive's Rockstar Games label. That includes the release of the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Ok, we were pretty brutal about that game in our review but there are quite a number of other titles that might be worth your time if you haven't played them before. You can download each game for a reduced cost or download all of Rockstar's library on Steam for $69.99 compared to its normal $99.99 price tag.

When Grand Theft Auto III was released by Rockstar Games and developer DMA Design (later known as Rockstar North) it changed the way games were thought about forever. The "open world" genre effectively started with the PS2 title and its October 2001 debut sold millions of copies, helped make the PS2 the "winner" in last generation's console wars.

The graphics (based on Criterion Games's RenderWare engine) and visual look were a bit simplistic and even a little cartoony in style but it also gave the designers a way to create a vast game world without having to worry about doing highly detailed visuals. Grand Theft Auto III and its two follow ups, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) improved the graphical looks slightly but all three games were built with the PS2 in mind which has relatively low hardware specs. Thus it wasn't hard to port all three games to the PC platform where one can expect users to have rigs that are much higher than the PS2's specs (all three games were released for the PC around six months or so after their debut on the PS2).

With the first patch for Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC now released, Rockstar Games now has plans to hold a online multiplayer event today for folks who might be interested in playing against the development team of the open world action game.

From Noon to 4 pm ET today, you can log into the Rockstar Social Club and play one of the many multiplayer game modes in GTA IV. During that time you might find yourself playing against one of the game's development team members. Their Games For Windows Live gamertags are listed on the Rockstar Social Club web site. Some people who log into the game at any time during this weekend will be eligible to win one of 24 prize packages from Rockstar Games.

Grand Theft Auto IV is a big game. There is a lot of missions to accomplish in the fictional world of Liberty City and as such we want to make sure that we give our final review of the PC version of the game (coming in the near future) a fair shake in instead of just playing though a few hours.

However, those few hours have certainly generated some initial thoughts about what the game is like so far. And yes, we are indeed including the many bugs and issues we have encountered along with many of you who have also tried to play the game. Yet there are things in the game we happen to like as well. So what are those talking points? We are glad you asked, because we happen to have 10 things we love and hate about GTA IV for the PC.

Click on the link above to read more about thing we love (and hate) about GTA IV PC

As we reported this past weekend, Rockstar Games team members stated in a IGN Q&A that they are indeed working on a patch for the very buggy PC release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now a post from a Rockstar Toronto team member on the fan site GTAForums.com has more infomation on the first patch.

The patch itself must go through Microsoft for approval (all games that support Games For Windows Live have to have that extra approval process) but Rockstar does expect that process to move swiftly. Here are some of the fixes they say will be in the patch:

-A fix to the crash after legal screen that some German customers were reporting.
-Numerous improvements to the video editor: Smarter naming of videos, improved rendering quality, better fx during replays
-Fix to bowling while using certain sensitive mice
-Fix for ATI 1900 shadows
-Overall savings to memory
-Graphic improvements to particle systems and mirrors
-Multiplayer character settings are preserved
-Support for DirectInput controllers.

In addition sign-ups to Rockstar Games Social Club have supposedly been improved which should have cut down or elimiated the MMA10 error that Big Download encountered when we first tried to play the game.

Update: The first patch has now been released.

It has not been a good week for PC fans of the Grand Theft Auto series. The latest title in the open world crime action series, Grand Theft Auto IV, has been plagued with bugs since its release. It's gotten so bad that folks who purhased and downloaded the game via Valve's Steam service can now ask for a refund, something that Valve rarely offers (head to Voodoo Extreme for details on how to get a refund).

Meanwhile, Nvidia has released a new beta graphics driver for its GeForce products for not just GTA IV but also for SLI improvements in Left 4 Dead and issues with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. The 180.84 beta drivers are in Windows XP and Vista versions (both 32 and 64-bits). Thanks FiringSquad. An ATI driver update is expected next week.

Finally the normally media shy Rockstar Games folks agreed to a Q&A session with IGN specifically to talk about the GTA IV PC issues. The Rockstar reps are clearly on the defensive throughout the interview saying things like, "The only thing we really have to go on in that regard is support calls we've been getting which have been quite low or as expected, which I think is roughly around one percent...It seems like maybe these forum posters are the more outspoken percentage of the players."

However they do admit that a patch for the game is coming, adding, "A lot of these issues obviously we haven't seen in our testing and we're working to reproduce them and find workarounds for those issues." There's no word on when the patch will be released.

On Wednesday we reported on our own issues with playing the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV along with other concerns. Rockstar Games has now issued an official statement on these issues, as supplied by Voodoo Extreme:

We are aware that a small number of fans are having problems running GTA IV on their PC's and we would like to assure them we are working to help solve these as quickly as possible.

We would ask anyone that is encountering difficulties to contact their local technical support helpline for advice and recommendations. These telephone numbers can be found in the game's manual.

There is also a regularly updated technical support page available on the Rockstar Games website where there are many useful faqs and information on how to resolve some common problems being encountered.

That official support web site has things like the official list of error codes (which oddly enough does not include the error code we and a number of other gamers have dealt with, MMA10) and on how you can improve your graphical settings (it states most gamers should go for medium settings saying, "Higher settings are provided for future generations of PCs with higher specifications than are currently widely available")

The highly anticipated release of the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV has been met with frustration by many gamers who have bought the title starting today. Gamers, especially those who have downloaded the open world action game via Valve's Steam service, have reported a number of bugs and crashes.

Big Download, in trying to review the game for the site, has come across one of the errors mentioned in a Steam forum post (thanks Shacknews): MMA10, which crashes the game to desktop after seeing the title's copyright screen. The temporary solution is not to sign onto the game's Rockstar Social Club online service. The catch is that while you can play the game in single player it deprives you of its multiplayer features.

Other errors we have seen include missing textures which seem to be solved if you don't have the game at super high (1900x1600) resolutions. Another game-loading error, RMN40, seems to be solved in Windows XP if you update the OS to the recent Service Pack 3 upgrade. Big Download has contacted Rockstar Games' PR folks to get a status report on the publisher's plans to resolve these many issues.

As promised a few weeks ago, Microsoft has now released a stand alone client for its Games For Windows Live service. Previously the service was put inside PC games that supported Live but now you can download it and have it ready to go on your desktop without having to start a game up.

At the moment the service is pretty bare bones in terms of content. There's only a handful of game videos to download and just one demo to check out, and it's for the PC version of the year old game Viva Pinata. There's no message center or friends access and there's not even a way to check out your Achievement points. You can add Microsoft Points to your account via the client, however.

Microsoft plans to use Games For Windows Live as a way to offer things like add-ons for titles like Fallout 3 and they have also said that having full games for download (a la Steam and Direct2Drive) is in the works as well. Still this first stand alone client release seems almost like a beta with just a few features implemented.

Update: It looks like the stand alone client was released as a way to update Games For Windows Live for the release of the PC version of Grand Theft Auto IV. Before you can play the game Rockstar's own update client requires that players download the stand alone client before they can play. Shacknews reports that European users have a demo of Kane and Lynch available through Games For Windows Live.

Download Games for Windows Live 2.0 (30 MB)