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Players Furious Over Buggy GTA IV PC Release 384

Jupix writes "It took Rockstar most of a year to port Grand Theft Auto IV to the PC, and while they claim this was because they wanted polish and quality with their PC release, it appears the result has been less than satisfactory. Players all over the internet are furious over numerous bugs in the release, ranging from nonfunctional internet registration and graphics glitches to completely inoperative installations. One of the game's largest retailers, Steam, has reportedly gone so far as to start handing out refunds to hordes of unsatisfied (and no doubt uncomfortably noisy) customers."
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Players Furious Over Buggy GTA IV PC Release

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  • by James_Duncan8181 ( 588316 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:35AM (#26000541) Homepage
    One would think that the Xbox 360 port should come right over...I'm just not sure where all the extra bugs would arise. The actual game logic and assets should be identical.
    • by ModernGeek ( 601932 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:49AM (#26000583)
      An easy port have been the case with the original xbox, as it was just a pentium 3 computer running a windows varient, but the new xbox 360 uses a power pc chip (used in macintoshes from the mid 90s until 2006) with an os that is based off of an early version of windows nt that supported power pc prcessors. I imagine the differences in modern pc architecture and the modern xbox actually make porting a game quite difficult if it is not written on a common platform that runs on all systems, which I assume because of it's nature, gta 4 is not
      • by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:54AM (#26000633) Homepage Journal

        As a modern geek, you should realise that CPU architecture doesn't matter a lot when coding in modern languages.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        I imagine the differences in modern pc architecture and the modern xbox actually make porting a game quite difficult if it is not written on a common platform that runs on all systems

        Such as C++?

        Here's a quick-and-dirty proof: debian has tons of stuff written in C++, and it runs on $BIGNUM architectures. I don't write fetch_to_L1_cache() or kill_instruction_pipeline() calls in my code.

        Sure, you can add inline assembly, but you can also ifdef it out and write replacement C++ on incompatible archs.

        • by AuMatar ( 183847 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @06:08AM (#26001037)

          Debian doesn't have the performance constraints of a game. While ISRs need to be fast, everything else can take up gobs of CPU without really noticing it. Games don't have that luxury. Talk to actual game programmers- they do use assembly, and they do have to worry about CPU and system architecture. I have a few friends who worked as recently as the PS2, they still have examples of hand rolled assembler for the shaders.

      • by mcbridematt ( 544099 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @05:49AM (#26000923) Homepage Journal
        The Xbox and Xbox 360 do not run Windows derivatives. They run a custom operating system which implements a portion of Win32 and DirectX API's. See Xbox developers post [msdn.com].
        • by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @06:23AM (#26001119) Homepage

          How is anything based on Win32 and DirectX not a Windows derivative?

          I once wasted close to an hour watching a Microsoft guy give a history of "big icons in a tool bar at the bottom of the screen" before he demonstrated the Mac OS X panel on Windows 7. They can claim all day long that it isn't what it looks like. But when you see it, it looks pretty obvious as to what it is.

          And I suppose WindowsCE isn't a Windows derivative either for the same reasons stated by that developer's post?

          People have hacked into and examined the XBox and XBox 360 code extensively and they rather disagree with the assertions of the developer. And to make a car analogy, I would rather trust the word of a mechanic than a salesman. "Oh no! A Lexus is not a Toyota!!" Right...

          • The 360 is more akin to the G5 PowerMac.
            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by AndrewNeo ( 979708 )
              Apparently during E3 when the 360 was first coming out, companies were demoing their games on G5 towers.
          • by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @08:32AM (#26001861) Homepage

            How is anything based on Win32 and DirectX not a Windows derivative?

            Those are APIs. Windows is an OS. Two completely different operating systems could use the same APIs, but handle the API calls completely different behind the scenes. That's kind of the point of an API.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Com2Kid ( 142006 )

            And I suppose WindowsCE isn't a Windows derivative either for the same reasons stated by that developer's post?

            WinCE is not a Windows derivative. It is a completely separate OS kernel that happens to have had a good deal of the Desktop's CRT and other APIs ported over to it some years back.

            Is it possible to have very carefully written code cross compile on WinCE and the desktop? Sure. But the same can be said for Windows XP and Linux. Stick to API libraries that exist on both platforms, and make liberal

        • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:38PM (#26007665) Homepage Journal

          Sources inside Microsoft said again and again that both Xboxes in fact did run ports of Windows. You can find numerous [windowsfordevices.com] supporting [answers.com] sources [caustik.com] (who outside Microsoft would know better than people writing an Xbox emulator?) for this claim. Sorry, but I simply do not believe your reference.

          It is even less likely that Microsoft wrote the operating system for the 360 from scratch. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, odds are it evolved from a duck - though it is not certain, it is the way to bet. Windows 2000 ran on the PowerPC until SP3 and was designed for portability - at least, it was redesigned for portability when they ported from the N-Ten to the x86. This is why they were able to port it to both DEC Alpha and IBM PowerPC in such a relatively short time. The Alpha port was the more commercially successful of the two since the Alpha was the more capable processor, and you could pay just as much for a PPC machine that would run NT with zero benefit, but the PPC port was probably the more capable of the two in another way - since it ran on standards-based PowerPC systems, it would run on a broader range of hardware including systems from IBM and Motorola.

          PowerPC support alone is not sufficient reason for my prejudice, however; that lies in Windows NT's multiprocessor support. Anyone who has followed operating system history to any significant degree knows that multiprocessing has always been one of the most complex features to support. SMP has certainly been one of the most contentious issues in *BSD-land for just this reason. The idea that Microsoft just tossed off a new operating system with multiprocessor support which provides the Win32 APIs and is stable enough for a games console is not an impossible one, but it does seem highly unlikely to be true given Microsoft's track record, which is poor to say the least.

          In summary, though Windows NT tends to have a lower penalty for thread creation than Unix and thus has some inherent advantages when it comes to multiprocessing and therefore even indicates that some people who work for or who have worked for Microsoft have some idea of what they are doing, I would not expect Microsoft to be capable of writing any operating system capable of providing a sizable portion of the Win32 (even though it is much less capable than Windows 2000, either operating system is a significant piece of software) from scratch at this point. If they were capable of doing this, they would certainly already have done so in order to replace Windows NT, which is long past the "showing its age" phase. Vista in particular is a mishmash of just about every computing model Microsoft has ever used. By far, the most logical explanation is that the Xbox operating system is based on Windows 2000, and so is the Xbox 360 operating system, but Microsoft's gaming business model is dependent on convincing people that they are not being sold a PC, and so they must deny any similarity unto their graves.

          Put another way, YHBT by Microsoft.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        I guess you've already been refuted, but I'll point out anyway that the PS3's cell processor is Power PC as well, and the PS3 has no problem with GTA 4 and didn't require a year to port to.

    • by Amphetam1ne ( 1042020 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:59AM (#26000661)

      It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately. It also needs you to upgrade to the latest Games For Windows release, which doesn't support Vista64 at the moment. So that's all the hardcore gamers with 4GB+ of ram out of the picture.

      Only cost them $200k to inconvenience players to such a high degree.... I hope everyone who's having problems returns it to the store. High levels of returns make the distributer very uneasy, which in turn should send a message to the publisher.

      • by forgoil ( 104808 )

        Unofrtunatly I can't show my displeasure quite as easily. I don't want to buy the game with that kind of DRM on it, no way no how no never. No game will ever be so good that I will put that kind of crap on my own computer. It's kind of ironic because I've decided to not pirate any games any more. And I buy games online these days (appstore, steam), and I loved GTA 3 so I want to play GTA 4. So now they have made me seriously contemplating getting through other channels. Idiots :( I might get the game at a d

      • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @05:32AM (#26000845)

        It's the DRM.

              Is that what they call Christmas now?

              It's not DRM, it's the "we have to get this out the door before Christmas z0mg Xmas sales!!!11" mentality from the short sighted marketing department. Ship now and patch later is typical for this time of year. It probably does not bode well for the franchise, however.

              Yeah, the DRM probably broke the game, but QA HAS to have seen this problem before shipping. Obviously $50 a copy was more important than the trivial fact of the game actually working or not.

        • by eulernet ( 1132389 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @11:48AM (#26004067)

          The QA never test the DRMed version (I know I have been a long time game programmer), they work on the non-DRM version !
          Protection is added at the last moment, and expected to not break the game.

          Also, they have been in a hurry to ship the game, so the QA were probably told to skip testing the DRM.

      • by Elrond, Duke of URL ( 2657 ) <JetpackJohn@gmail.com> on Friday December 05, 2008 @06:20AM (#26001089) Homepage

        Huh... I guess I've just been very lucky so far. I've been playing GTA4 for two days now with no stability issues. I've got Vista64 installed with 4GB RAM. That's the gaming side of my PC (I do everything else in Debian), so I try to tune it towards better game performance... things like turning off services that I'll never need for games.

        Now, the port does have some issues. I've got a fairly decent machine and, especially when compared with games like Crysis or Farcry 2, this engine clearly needs some optimization. Strangely, it seems CPU limited rather than GPU limited. After I quit the game, I can see on my CPU graph that both cores have been running at ~100%. I spent some time tweaking the video settings and right now I've got it running with both decent quality and a decent framerate.

        One "feature" that seems to be annoying a lot of people is the video memory "calculator" the game uses. For each setting you modify, it calculates how much video memory that will cost. Your total is your installed video memory (512MB on my card). Not everything affects it, but increasing resolution, texture size, and draw distance will. So depending on how you set these you can't necessarily have them all high. But, it doesn't seem to work very well. You can override it from the command line. I forced it to use my LCD resolution (1280x1024) with high textures and a decent draw distance. This puts me at about 730/512MB on my "budget" yet the game still runs just fine and it looks better too.

        They added a "dynamic shadow" feature to the PC version which you can adjust in the graphics menu. The values range from 0 to 16, but the quality at any setting is mediocre. It's a nice idea, but poorly implemented, and the game will run a bit faster when I turn it off.

        Another annoying bit already mentioned is the control scheme. Fortunately, I purchased an XBox360 controller for use on my PC because that is the only gamepad supported by GTA4 (though I didn't know that when I bought the controller). Also, you can't actually *change* any of the mappings. There is a "Controller Configuration" menu item, but when you select it you are shown a picture of the controller and a diagram of what each button does. You can press R-stick left and right but all that does is show you the mappings for on foot, in vehicle, etc.

        Like previous GTA ports, the PC version will let you play your own music on one of the radio stations (Independence FM here). They've even improved it for GTA4 and one of the modes will automatically insert fake commercials and DJ banter between your music if you like. But... it doesn't support Ogg (my preferred format) or many others. I do have some MP3s, though, and could always transcode if I wanted. The game specifically says that you can put shortcuts to your music or music folders into the user music directory. But... it doesn't work with networked mounts. I keep all of my music on my server and access via Samba from Windows or NFS in Linux. But not for GTA4... it just ignores any shortcuts that access another machine. Lame!

        Still, despite these issues, it's been working far better for me than it has for most people and I've certainly been enjoying it so far.

        • by Zarhan ( 415465 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @07:10AM (#26001333)

          I do have some MP3s, though, and could always transcode if I wanted. The game specifically says that you can put shortcuts to your music or music folders into the user music directory. But... it doesn't work with networked mounts. I keep all of my music on my server and access via Samba from Windows or NFS in Linux. But not for GTA4... it just ignores any shortcuts that access another machine. Lame!

          Does the old "Map network location to a drive letter" standby work? That way the shortcuts would refer to e.g. E:\Music instead of \\FILESERVER\MUSIC...?

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by paeanblack ( 191171 )

          A registry tweak will fix this:

          First, move anything out of the "My Music" folder on the local machine. If you don't have one, just create an empty folder under "My Documents" and name it "My Music"

          Open regedit and browse to:
          HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal

          Edit the key named "My Music"

          Change the value to "\\yourservername\pathtoyourmusic"

          If this key doesn't exist, then create it.

          Log out, log back in.

          Add a shortcut to your "My Music" folder in the GTA music

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by balthan ( 130165 )

        It's the DRM. Many of the crashing problems seem to be Securom crashing, which causes the game client to exit to desktop imediately.

        Most of the problems are being caused by the dual online accounts required. The Rockstar Social Club servers initially couldn't handle the volume, which was causing the game to crash on startup. And people were having problems getting Games for Windows live installed right with its dependencies (such as .NET Framework 3.5). My guess is something isn't quite right with the GT

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        I'm sorry... What?

        You're saying "Games for Windows", the Microsoft initiative to brand PC gaming as something akin to the consoles... Doesn't work on a version of their own operating system?

        That's awesome. Nice one, Microsoft! Nice to see you're so firmly committed to this you're ensuring compatibility across the board.

        Thanks for that info. That shows what a farce this "Games for Windows" nonsense is.

        And you're absolutely right about Securom being behind the issues. What's hilarious is Rockstar just a coupl

    • I'm not (Score:4, Informative)

      by Mascot ( 120795 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @05:03AM (#26000685)

      The Xbox version does not have SecuROM. But, while certainly a factor, that does not account for all of these issues. I'm guessing the rest is down to insufficient testing on a variety of configurations.

      And let's not forget that Chrismas is around the corner. It wouldn't be the first time a release was rushed to make a holiday season.

      Personally the game fell off my radar when they confirmed they'd use SecuROM. Hopefully they'll release a non-restricted version in the future. Not to mention a bug fixed one.

      I would like to point out that this version of SecuROM has some FADE type functionality in it. That makes it even more difficult to separate bugs caused by the restrictions software gone haywire from the actual game code.

      Deciding to never buy titles with SecuROM and similar draconian schemes was the best decision I ever made I think. It saved me from the mediocrity that was Spore, and now from this bugfest.

      • by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        Yes, EA still owes me money for Spore. You can't return opened PC games after all.

        I might pirate GTAIV. I hear it works better that way and, again, they still owe me one.

    • Yes, Rockstar. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by crhylove ( 205956 )

      Yes, Rockstar, please tell us: Why is it so hard to write good Windows code? How is the PS3 so much easier? Why don't you let us play the games at much higher resolution on much better hardware? Is it really that important to sell mediocre crap and scrape every miserable penny? Is that also the motivation behind the DRM? Why don't you just sell a good product at a good price and stop trying to coerce the market. It won't work. Eventually some other game house will make your type of game, only better,

    • Well, nice idea in theory. The reality is however the 360 has a power PC architecture: the byte ordering in all of the assets needs to be reversed; the code that's been split to run over 6 threads has to be reduced to run on dual/quad core; The hand crafted maths routines using the altivec instruction set (with 128registers) need to be ported to SSE (with 8). And the list goes on. The original xbox was similar in architecture to a PC, but the 360 is much nearer to an old G5 PowerMac.

      Trust me, there is actu
  • by Tojo-Mojo ( 707846 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:50AM (#26000589)

    The port is very faithful to the console versions. My favorite part is the "Please do not turn off the system" message when saving. I was just about to hit that big 'ol power button, too!

  • Ha-ha! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @04:51AM (#26000597)

    Makes you wish you could have tried it first before buying it, huh? Oh wait, thanks to "copyright infringement" laws making YOU the criminal and DRM, you can't.

          Enjoy being ripped off your $49.99. I guess eventually they'll get a patch out. But remember to support the industry! They obviously want your money more than you do.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 05, 2008 @05:06AM (#26000699)

    Pirates can't even fix your game.

  • Bought this POS. (Score:5, Informative)

    by juuri ( 7678 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @06:10AM (#26001047) Homepage

    Despite my concerns over all the hoopla DRM I purchased this via Steam. Let's go over a few of the problems:

    a) ~15 Gig. Really? Really.
    b) Needs new versions of at least 2, maybe 3 Microsoft programs to be installed before playing.
    c) Installs some fucking crap ass community software that was never asked for or mentioned when making the initial purchase over steam. This shiet from Rockstar goes in the system tray and puts up a fricken splash screen at every reboot on your desktop just to play their game.
    d) The inane pushing of the new Games for Windows stuff. Oh I have to create a local G4W profile even if I never plan on playing online?
    e) During loading it displays a black screen for 3-4 minutes on my box with 4gig/7200rpm disk. It's a laptop so at least I can feel the disk spinning to make sure it is doing something.
    f) The resolution change takes SO long I never get to confirm it before it switches back when I am actually in the game.
    g) The first time I ran it with defaults, no textures loaded until about 30 seconds *after* the opening cinematic was done and my player was sitting in the car.
    h) Running the benchmark twice within one session causes a crash on my machine.
    i) It has already crashed multiple times. ... since I only boot into windows to play games like this it has basically rendered itself a total fucking disgrace. Valve better be refunding my money or they will lose an up-till-now loyal customer. I've been playing games for like 28 years (GIT AWF MY L4WN) and this is the most buggy piece of shit my eyes have seen since some of the Atari Jaguar games.

    • Well GTA hasn't finished downloading yet (seed fuckers! Err, I mean, come on Steam!) but having played Bully, I'm not surprised at all.

      I'll start with what was my first experience after installing and starting the game. At the first start I actually got stuck in the menus for a while because of the retarded default bindings. Who the hell sets Left Alt as "action" or "confirm"? What's wrong with the Enter key? I think returning to the previous menu used also something stupid, like left shift, though it seems

      • Seriously, you say Crysis in benchmarks averages about 35 on the same hardware but I guarantee you, owning the same CPU and gfx card (actually a 9800 but it's exactly the same, Nvidia just changed the number!) that you can't run Crysis at High/1680x1050 and get 35fps.

        Crysis benchmarks are all flawed. It's incredible the number of sites that just use the included benchmark runs even though Crytek go to pains to point out that their benchmarks don't indicate actual game performance, they should only be used t

      • I appreciate this game has major issues but there's no need to exaggerate, it makes your other points seem invalid.

    • Re:Bought this POS. (Score:5, Informative)

      by mike2R ( 721965 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @08:50AM (#26002013)

      c) Installs some fucking crap ass community software that was never asked for or mentioned when making the initial purchase over steam. This shiet from Rockstar goes in the system tray and puts up a fricken splash screen at every reboot on your desktop just to play their game.

      This really annoyed me as well - Startup Guard [mlin.net] caught it trying to register that community crap to run at startup. Denied it but it still keeps itself running after closing the game. I mean why? What chance is there that I want that crap running 24/7 on my PC? Reminds me of the last time I installed Real Player. Right click on the tray icon and you can uncheck "run at system start" so at least you can turn it off, but it is still out of order.

      Not had any of the other problems you mention though - well except the 15GB (!!) download from Steam, I'd have bought a physical copy if I'd known it was that big.

    • Re:Bought this POS. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Degro ( 989442 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @09:13AM (#26002251)
      Games for Windows is a load of crap. I thought it was great at first because Crysis and Fallout 3 both had full support for the USB XBox 360 controllers out of the box. All I had to do was plug it in. Great, I like to relax and sit back with a controller at my PC like I do at with actual Xbox. Then I rushed out to buy Call of Duty: World at War for my PC because it also had the logo. No controller support whatsoever. WTF? What does Games for Windows even mean then if it's not going to be a coherent Xbox like experience for windows gaming? The whole effort feels very much like scam now.
      • Re:Bought this POS. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by The Moof ( 859402 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @10:25AM (#26002975)
        Games for Windows is a good idea done wrong, and only if you have an Xbox360. I thought it was nice to have a cross-platform friends and all that. However, it's very poorly implemented.
        • They tie settings and saves into your profile and you have to be signed in (either locally or on Live). There are workarounds for this, but I'm not so hot on extra work to play your save game files.
        • If you want to compare achievements with your PC version and someone's Xbox version, you can't (without pen and paper). Live thinks that a version for windows and a version for the 360 is two completely different games.
        • When it opts to update your games it sometimes offers no feedback that it's working, or that it has completed successfully. It usually just dumps you back to the desktop when completed.
        • Sometimes, it's the culprit for game crashes and BSOD's.

        They should've added it as an optional feature instead of making it a requirement to use. My first experience with it was in Fallout 3. At first it was nifty, but after coming across all of the problems mentioned above, I'm not so sure it's worth the hassle.

  • by meist3r ( 1061628 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @06:53AM (#26001261)
    Seriously, so many developers and publishers have been complaining about the huge rate of PC title piracy (e.g. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20567 [gamasutra.com] or http://www.videogamer.com/news/18-10-2008-9693.html [videogamer.com]) and how much more they love their locked-down consoles. Isn't this move the smartest thing Rockstar could have done?

    I mean If I made 400$m with my latest game on the consoles alone and I feared I wouldn't sell as many PC copies as I could have I just make the PC version the shittiest experience you can have. Horrendously high hardware requirements, terrible online components, cluttered with spy/mal/adware. That will turn off as many PC customers as possible and make it less attractive for pirates.

    I bet the console sales figures of GTA IV will go up again now that many PC gamers have realized that they'd rather buy this for their console than deal with all the crap. Watch for the spike!
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is either a strategy or a colossal fail. Since there is G4W live shit and FailRom drm installed bundled, I'm leaning towards strategy.

    I own every GTA game ever made. I opted for GTA IV on 360. I actually got a 360 for it. That being said, I'm a diehard PC gamer. I prefer PC for every game.

    I could have waited, but when I heard GTA IV was a 'G4W live' only release, I knew rockstar had fucked up.

    The others have all been flawless PC releases. They just know better.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @08:02AM (#26001647) Homepage Journal

    I mean, you get 4 programs on your harddrive for the price of one -
    1) SecureROM
    2) Games for Windows LIVE
    3) Rockstar Social Club
    4) An early Beta version of some game

    Sounds like a great deal to me.

  • by snarfies ( 115214 ) on Friday December 05, 2008 @08:10AM (#26001693) Homepage

    I was really looking forward to buying GTA4 for the PC. I am the proud owner of GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA. But I can't buy GTA4, and this was so deeply dissapointing I actually sent Rockstar/Take2 a physical paper letter (which I am sure they will laugh at, ball up, and throw in the trash).

    The problem? Mandatory online activation enforced by SecuROM. It isn't so much the latter I object to (though I DO object to it) as the former. I sometimes actually go back and install a game 5, 10, or even more years later and replay it if it was any good. What happens 10 years from now when the machine I am required to connect to no longer exists? Sure, I'm sure I can download a crack, or a patch, or something by then, but I want to own a fully working game right out of the box, not crippleware.

    I know that the same applies to MMORPGs as well, but guess what? I have never, and never will, buy one of those, either.

    • I know that the same applies to MMORPGs as well, but guess what? I have never, and never will, buy one of those, either.

      MMOs such as WOW don't have DRM per say. I guess you could consider Warden DRM, it's more like spyware though, and it doesn't stay on your system when you uninstall the game. Games like that don't need DRM because you need to pay for access to play. I guess you could go to a private server, but many of those have broken features like spells that don't work or instances you can't play.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mascot ( 120795 )

      I don't see why you draw a comparison to MMOs. It's not in the same ballpark.

      It is understood that no MMO will keep running forever. Those servers aren't an activation scheme. They are *the game*.

      It is not understood that a single player game will refuse to run in ten years time (assuming you have the antiquated hardware and OS to run it still).

      Anyways, I totally agree. I never buy an application anymore without first contacting the developers and asking them whether it has any kind of online activation sch

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jim Hall ( 2985 )

      I was really looking forward to buying GTA4 for the PC. I am the proud owner of GTA3, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA. But I can't buy GTA4, and this was so deeply dissapointing I actually sent Rockstar/Take2 a physical paper letter (which I am sure they will laugh at, ball up, and throw in the trash).

      Take it from someone who's actually played GTA4 (on the PS3) - you aren't missing much. Gotta say, this version isn't as interesting or exciting as the GTA3 or GTA:SA.

It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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