Well, I bought GTA4 with all of the crippled DRM and such and almost immediately regretted it.
It wasn't the copy protection that got to me, that was already a slap in the face, it was the horrendous bugs that plagued the game and made gameplay almost impossible.
Now, I'm on a pretty high-end system, played Crysis through and through on 1680x1050 on HIGH @ 30 FPS avg. The interesting thing, this game ran exactly the same on exactly the same settings, yet looks like Hitman: Blood Money (a game which ran brilliantly on my system three years ago, I might say).
Beyond performance, onto the bugs. The terrible, terrible bugs.
Imagine you are driving in a car. Ok, now every single model and texture except for your car is gone. You're driving in a blank state of nothing. Some horrific memory leak somewhere in the programming is sucking up all of your RAM, all your GPU's RAM, and on top of that, is also writing to your page file.
In order to get this game to actually work, I had to spend at least three hours of frustration, but eventually - I got it to work at least halfway decently, and with an Xbox 360 controller. I could have done the exact same fuckin' thing on a console without the hassle.
The end result?
A poor performing, terrible console port with horrible game-stopping bugs and annoyances.
Am I still going to play it? Maybe. A very tenous maybe.
The only reason for that, is by what I've seen so far, the game is like Grand Theft Auto 3, but way more polished. That, and Brighton Beach. Oh, and that CCCP hat I bought, gives Nico +300 awesome points.
Anyway, if anyone ever wants to attempt playing this, use this string for the shortcut for LaunchGTAIV.exe:
"-norestrictions -nomemrestrict -novblank –availablevidmem 512 -percentvidmem 100"
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