Spurious Logic

GTA 4 woes

So picked up GTA 4 from direct2drive last weekend for around €5 which given the shop price or ~€30-40 is a pretty nice discount.

50 hour download and extended install time? No problem. Installing Rockstar Social Club ... meh. I have no interest in sharing clips, marking achievements or playing multiplayer, but if it's a requirement to play the single player then sure, why not.

Then some bumpf about Games for Windows, but I already have an account and I'm in and playing. Running nicely on my P.C. but then I try and save. "You cannot save unless you are logged into Games for Windows". Niiice... I can't save my singleplayer game unless I'm online. I'm not happy about it, but it gets better. Whey I login successfully, (please wait, downloading your profile, this may take a few minutes...) I get a "Games for Windows needs to update... ...your PC may reboot after updating" followed by a non moving progress bar.

I left it there for two hours and coming back I still can't save my damn game. I'm online, I have a games for windows account, I've tried jumping through all the hoops. And three things occurred to me:

  1. If I was a less technical person I would be blaming the PC platform for this SNAFU, trying to return the broken game, and investing in a console if I wanted to play games.

  2. Microsoft either doesn't want gaming to be easy on Windows (to encourage you to buy XBoxes) or they are incompetent and cant pull together a decent online community service (equally possible)

  3. Rockstar doesn't care about PCs either. Consoles are where the big bucks are.

None of these facts are news, in fact it's pretty much common knowledge amongst PC gamers that the big companies are moving away from the PC towards to consoles because of better profit margins and fewer risk factors because of platform lock-in, hardware standardisation and reduced piracy rates. (pro tip: only one of the previous reasons actually matters to the companies)

But still it's a bit of a slap in the face when you have a game, it runs and you can't save the damn thing. Don't even get me started on enforced check pointing in a PC game (Thank you for artificially extending the play time due to 20 year old hardware restrictions; you can grab the full game state from memory and dump it to hard disk if you have to.. Go on I've got 500GB to spare...).

Hopefully I'll get it sorted this evening. At least the game runs nicely and it sure looks purty...

-- edit --

So after the last try, I installed and logged into Games for Windows separately on my PC and then quit that. Then I went ahead and cranked up GTA4 and all saved successfully.  There are also videos up on youtube showing how to set up an offline account.

All in all the autosave after every mission is a nice touch. The last time I played a GTA game was GTA3 Vice City and GTA3. I had GTA3 San Andreas and while it looked very nice I could never get into it. It was always just too much like work, building up stats and making sure I'd eaten enough. I'm sure it was fantastic if you had the time, but I didn't. The previous two though, I had a absolute blast with.