GTA IV Troubleshooter

Technical entry for the gamers, recounting bugs I've experienced with GTA IV.

Yes, I experienced the game "freezing". The first day.

There's a fix that's being publicized about deleting all traces of the game from your PS3, rebooting and reloading. I say, skip that. You lose all your progress, obviously. I tried it and started up again and, hours later, still experienced a "freeze" crash.

If your game freezes completely during gameplay, just try rebooting and starting from your last save point. I'm about 37% into the game. After some game-killing freezes on the first two days, I've been pretty fortunate. The game will occasionally freeze for 1 or 2 seconds, but it seems to kick back in.

Got a new problem yesterday...

Fired up the game for a session, the game reached the "[LAST MISSION] IS LOADING...." screen, and it wouldn't load.

It didn't freeze, technically. The "loading" text kept animating, and the console still recognized the controller when I pressed the PS button. But the game would NOT load. Just stayed on that screen.

SONY released a remedy checklist. I still say ignore the steps about deleting all the files/progress.

What worked for me was --

1) Rebooting without the disc.
2) Going to the internet browser, deleting the cookies/cache.
3) Unplug the ethernet cable from the console.
4) Loading up the game while NOT connected to the network.

This seems to be a problem specific to the online connection, for some reason. When I restarted without a network connection, the game loaded up fine.

It's a crumby workaround because the multiplayer function is actually pretty great when you can get it working. I really hope they release a proper patch for all the bugs soon.