I just got home from DDL friday afternoon, eagerly awaiting to try my copy of GTA4. I had ordered it from EB Games[.com] just prior to leaving on tuesday afternoon. Well, it turned out I had put the wrong billing address, so even though they had charged me (Pending… ?), they couldn’t ship the item. Luckily though, GTA wasn’t like the Wii, and I was able to pick one up at the local GameStop near my house.

So, I start up the PS3, and throw in the game. You get what people are saying is a 7-minute install, which basically copies a bunch of media and files to the Playstation 3 hard drive (3gb worth) to optimize performance. After this, it then proceeds to automatically start a new game (or load the last auto save) for you. It finished the install, no problems whatsoever (although I’ve seen lots of reports of the game hanging somewhere around here), and then it went to the black loading screen saying “Starting a new game…”. About 10 minutes later I decided there was a problem.

After much searching of forums and Googling of the internet (I wonder when they’ll put Google into the dictionary?), I managed to find a solution. Unplug the internet cable. Voila! It works all of a sudden. Now of course, this is completely useless when I want online play. After getting into the game a little ways, I plugged back in the internet able (and thankfully I saved before this), and the game froze right there. I had to hard boot the PS3 to get past this.

Afterwards, I booted up the game again, and it froze up on the loading mission screen. I read a bit more into the forum posts, and I also found that you might be able to get this to correct itself by going to Quit Game in the PS3′s dashboard menu. Doing this, by the way, resets your system completely (it crashes the system). Once it had loaded back up again, it managed to get past the loading screen, and I was finally able to get into multiplayer.

Once in multiplayer you join a game’s lobby (this is after selecting what kind of match you want), and this is about as far as I got. I waited probably about 20 minutes in different rooms waiting for a game to start, and no one ever got one going, so I gave up. I’m hoping that multiplayer will be fun, but until people figure out how to hit the “Ready” button, I think I’ll stick to completely the singleplayer missions first.

I’m hoping this post helps everyone else get around their issues with the PS3 version. I haven’t heard of any problems on the 360 version, so XBox owners may be in luck.

Oh, ya, I’m zeeg99 on the PS3 if you want to throw me an add