Where oh where to I begin to go with Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC.  My first thirty was a complete disaster of a gaming experience.  First off, I did not even get to play the game for three days, because Steam went dysfunctional over the game, killing download speeds for anyone trying to get the game.  After a convoluted install process that required me to install the Rockstar Social Club (I keep wanting to call in the Timex Social Club), and then the game, and then the new Games for Windows Live update, it was like I could of said my First Thirty was installing the game.

With the install process behind me, I started up the game, and after a fairly long loading time, I got into the game, and saw rather muddy textures, and jerky animation.  The opening sequence almost played out like a slideshow, instantly bringing on a headache of unimaginable power.  I persevered, and started to play through the first few missions for Roman and Vlad, and found that the game would get slower over the thirty minutes of play, immediately telling me there is a huge memory hole somewhere in the code.

Graphically, if you have a Cray supercomputer in your living room, you will probably get a great visual experience, but my Quad Core Q6600 and 512MB Nvidia 8800GT were no match for the game, even though that combo tore Crysis a new one in high graphics mode.  I tried to play with the settings, but unless you create a commandline file and figure out what the command switches are to place in there, you will play a miserable experience.

Right now, I have contempt for Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC.  Rockstar seems to have dropped the ball with this and their recently released Bully on the PC.  One has to wonder how they managed to get this out the door without noticing things like framerate drops and at some points, whole chunks of textures dropping out of the game.

Even more appaling is reading this months PC Gamer right before I typed this up and realizing that they could not stop gushing about how great the game is, just making me realize that they really are the shills I thought they were.  They completely glossed over the framerate issues.  Look for a review when the game is possibly completed, but it may never get finished at the rate it is taking them to patch the game.