It’s been at least a year since I last purchased a video game for the PC. Call me picky, but I don’t have much time for video games anymore, and if a game doesn’t grab my attention like finding an Asian who holds political office in Australia, I won’t spend more than a couple hours playing it. I’m sick of the sci-fi, alien-invading, zombie-infested distopia that has plagued the popular first-person-shooter genre, fuck half life 2.
Rockstar Games’ recent title ‘Grand Theft Auto 4′ did just that. To me it is like the entire Australian parliment being over run by Asians…ok, bad analogy. In the words of Dr. Kelso from scrubs, “there’s nothing like scoring a Caddie and mowing down street hoes”, and sometimes, that’s all I want to do in life; I don’t want to kill zombies or aliens. It’s a game that fulfills fantasies. Needless to say, I bought the game as soon as it was released on PC.
Commercially, GTA4 had been a huge success on the xbox 360 and PS3 receiving perfect scores from several reviews while breaking many sales records. It’s release on the PC yesterday (December 3, 2008) had be widely anticipated. I’m not normally an early adopter when it comes to new techology (which includes software), because technology today is very complex, and there’s an internal conflict between the marketers pushing for release dates and developers trying to meet quality assurance guidelines. In the case of GTA4 for the PC, marketers won the battle. The prospect of releasing just before the celebration of a few days of extravagant consumerism that we call christmas is too great an opportunity to miss. Thus, this release date was much too early. The game is plagued with bugs. A list of common ones with possible solutions can be found here.
Rockstar has quickly responded with some possible fixes and a statement stating that they are working on the problem.
An interesting bug that I’m experiencing is the “missing textures” bug, ironically it occurs on the video card listed as the card that meets the official minimum requirements for the game to be reasonably playable. This is alleged to be a problem with Nvidia’s drivers and Nvidia is “working on the problem”.
My guess is that many disappointed PC gaming fans of the series won’t be playing this for another couple weeks.
On another note, it’s sad to see PC games being over run by DRM. Not only do you have to install the game, but you have to authenticate online, get an account on something called social club, which needs to connect to a windows live account for online play. compare that to “put the disc in the drive and play” for a console game.
I understand that piracy is killing PC gaming, but having such complex and error prone DRM schemes is not a good solution. Those who pirate games will find a way to crack it, because it only takes one person to crack the game and release it for mass piracy to occur, and any computer security expert knows, nothing is secure, especially if you have physicall access to the machine running the software. Those who do the right thing and purchace the game legally are punished with a 10 step installation guide that takes about an hour to complete even for the tech savvy gamers.
I should have listen to my anti-early adopter voice and let the brave early adopters bare the risk. Maybe I should get an xbox 360, it’s been out for a while and they’ve fixed most of the kinks.
