Breaking news!

I bought Grand Theft Auto 4 this morning on the way to work excited about the promise from the incredibly superlative reviews. I get it home and play for about a half hour before the game froze up. No biggie. Games have frozen before. I reboot and play for another ten minutes and the game freezes while on the pause menu.

Now, a little miffed over the situation, I took to the Internet to see what was going on. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with the problem. Various other outlets seemed to offer two possible solutions:

1. Clear the game data and start again.

This I tried. I rebooted the console and the game froze during the second cutscene.

2. Clear the X360 cache (From the System blade on 360, select Memory and then your Xbox’s hard drive and then hit Y for the advanced settings. Then enter the magical combination of X, X, LB, RB, X, X and choose to perform maintenance.) The reason for this is that the problem is purported to be an overflow of the system’s cache. How this was untested on all configurations of hardware is unknown, seeing as this problem supposedly occurs on both platforms.

This I also tried and the game crashed in the same spot.

Apparently, Rockstar is aware of the solution and ‘feels terrible‘, which means a fuck of a lot to me. Let’s say this only happens to 1% of players and you shipped four million units at launch. That’s a medium-sized football stadium full of gamers who can’t get to the first mission.

No doubt they are working on a fix up there as we speak, but it has to get certified by MS before it can be pushed. So how long will we have to wait? Is anyone else out there reading my blog experiencing this? This is the kind of bug you need to find during certification.