See my earlier entries.
Tried playing the game with all settings set to THE LOWEST POSSIBLE.
So I went to their tech support web site. I noticed that they announced NEW ATI and NVidia drivers just a few days ago. So, I downloaded the new drivers for my ATI card. My card is at the bare end of acceptable for their Minimum System Requirements… Jesus. Sad, because even though this card is no longer even manufactured (I would hate to be in the video card business), it still costs around $150 new on some sites. It’s only a 256 meg card, and all the new ones are 512 with faster GPU’s. So, I update the drivers, and, voila! The game hangs WORSE THAN EVER. I continue to read their main tech support page: They also have a patch for the game already. So, I download and install that one. No go. Game still pauses wantonly. I continue to read the tech support page. It says I can put a .txt file with some command in the game directory; I do this and WOW! I CAN PLAY! I played for maybe a full hour. Then my character had to walk into a clothing store, and it jammed up again. I reset the computer (CTRL+ALT+DEL Does not work in this game), and tried again. I loaded the game, just got started on driving around, and Hongmei calls me to go perform random tasks. I come back, game’s locked up. I KNEW it would be locked: Any time I walk away & don’t do anything in the game for a minute or two, bam. it’s locked up. I gave up at that point. Enough torture for me. I read through their readme file, and there was a couple other of command line options I may try, such as some -nocache option and some other. but I doubt they’ll work and I will probably need to arrange a time when the planets are in line, and I can sit in front of the computer undisturbed during the day and call their tech support.
During the hour I was able to play the game, I must say that in spite of the “Stunningly detailed, high resolution graphics”, the game play was still really damn fun and what you’d expect from a new GTA game. The cars behave in a much “Heavier” way, hard to describe; it’s way easier to whip the rear ends around. It’s also much harder to SLOW DOWN!
In the new GTA, yes, there are Girlfriends that show up as little hearts on the map. I learned that in the 3rd mission.
