For those of you continuing to have Grand Theft Auto IV lockups on your PS3 even after the May 7th Rockstar patch... tough noogies. The latest 2.35 firmware won't specifically help. Sony says that the "minor update" will "improve stability of some PS3 titles" -- then clarifies that GTA IV is not part of the vagary. Nevertheless, Sony does say that they "have a identified a solution that should resolve the issue." So buck up Niko and get on the horn with Sony, God knows the police won't help.
[Via
Joystiq, thanks Warren and Luis C.]
Read -- GTA IV freezing / not loading help
Read -- 2.35 firmware
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Terry @ May 15th 2008 1:22AM
Where abouts in the game do people experience freezing?
Richardh @ May 15th 2008 1:25AM
It is usually at the first loading screen for me before I even get to play.
Blaine Oliver @ May 15th 2008 6:53AM
Be you wish you had got that 360 now dont you? Especially now the new ones have an incredibly low fault rate.
matthew @ May 15th 2008 6:56AM
ah yes.. those indestructable never freezing xboxes.
Marc @ May 15th 2008 12:45PM
"new ones have an incredibly low fault rate"
yes. it is amazing how incredibly reliable "new" things can be. more reliable than old things for sure... you must be proud of your proprietary mess
CoNFuZeD @ May 15th 2008 1:22AM
GTAIV never crashes on my 360 :D
iH8Engadget @ May 15th 2008 1:26AM
It doesn't have a chance of crashing, cause you can't get past the "red ring of death."
Jimbo @ May 15th 2008 1:29AM
troll away, xbot, but Rockstar's press release confirmed that the game has some problems on 360s and on launch PS3s. On the PS3, all you have to do is turn off the internet until you've saved a game, then turn it on and you're good to go.
And I don't think a 360 zealot would claim reliability should be the deciding factor in choice of console. You have better arguments than that (such as Bioshock).
CoNFuZeD @ May 15th 2008 1:38AM
Yeah the red ring of death got me last month =/
But the good people at microsoft fixed my console in a Jiffy =D
Pc_Madness @ May 15th 2008 2:24AM
Its frozen on my 360 about 3 times... been alright for the last couple of hours of gameplay though. :)
Ricky J. @ May 15th 2008 4:38AM
@Jimbo wow you playslaves are getting feisty. You shouldn't be upset over your problems. I have the Falcon which have a 90% success rate so I guess I need not worry about RRoD. Though the ps3 getting it's first AAA exclusive
a year and a half after release sounds troubling. Also, I'm pretty happy knowing I'll get some extra enjoyment out of my copy of GTA4.
Daniel @ May 15th 2008 9:04AM
I just bought an xbox 360 (i.e its brand new) and have played GTA 4 non stop since the release date and it has NEVER crashed...
PS3 pwned? yes. :D
O BTW GTA4 on xbox live basically increases its value 1000000000 times, I guess you ps3 owners wouldn't know about that... losers...
:D (let the flaming begin)
Walt @ May 15th 2008 10:01AM
It freezes on my 360 after extended gameplay, making me think it is a heat related issue. No other games have ever freezed. For me, it usually freezes while driving around the city.
Last night when this happened, before it froze it glitched for a second, then all the cars in the neighborhood - including my own - were floating 2 feet off the ground. Just going about their business, floating along. It was pretty funny. Then about 2min later, it froze.
CharlieX @ May 15th 2008 1:26AM
Odd. It's the only game on my Ps3... and it's been playing just fine for many, many hours.
mushy @ May 15th 2008 1:29AM
Still no problems at all with my PS3 or with GTA4 for that matter.
-Knocks on Wood-
Jimbo @ May 15th 2008 1:39AM
the problem is extremely limited, and if you've been able to play for a while, it's pretty unlikely you will have a problem. If you're using the wired connection and a launch PS3, you might have problems if you turn on your wifi connection. If you've been using your wifi connection, you can probably rest very easy.
John Datserakis @ May 15th 2008 1:37AM
I read the word vagary as vagina the first time through
j_g_puff @ May 15th 2008 3:01AM
Well done.
Chris @ May 15th 2008 8:40AM
Too bad the author misused the word. It means "extravagance". It does not refer to something that is vague.
Luigi193 @ May 15th 2008 9:41AM
Whadya want a medal?
Dr. Evil @ May 15th 2008 2:22PM
1. an unpredictable or erratic action, occurrence, course, or instance: the vagaries of weather; the vagaries of the economic scene.
Yeah, it means random or erratic not vague.
Thanks alot engadget. I could have misused the word and been subjected to social ridicule had it not been for Chris and his plethora of vocabularied erudition.
dagamer34 @ May 15th 2008 1:38AM
Anyone notice that the PS3 version of GTA IV has a few extra artwork scenes before the game starts? Is that on purpose?
CharlieX @ May 15th 2008 2:15AM
longer load time would be my guess
ethana2 @ May 15th 2008 1:40AM
I hope this doesn't break anything for otheros... goodness knows we don't need any more problems.
Chris @ May 15th 2008 1:49AM
anyone else find that they cant play divx/xvid with the new update?
Colin Potter @ May 15th 2008 2:00AM
works fine for me... i wish it had WMV support :(
BuddyBoy @ May 15th 2008 2:04AM
I'm sure it does, but you have to activate it in the preferences menus.
Drew @ May 15th 2008 2:09AM
Well, I just recently bought a 40gb PS3. Played GTAIV for awhile and all was well. Randomly when I tried to load it one day it acted like normal and started showing the artwork while loading and then it just froze up, artwork kept changing but would not load into the game.
I figured it was something to do with the files it installs so I deleted the 3GB+ of data and rebooted the game. It reinstalled everything and then loaded right into the game, kept my save, and no problems since then.
wslcrew @ May 15th 2008 2:41AM
I had exactly the same problem. It turns out that PSN connection was causing the problem. I just unplugged ethernet cable (or disconnect the wireless connection) on my PS3 and it was fine. They recently issued 1.01 patch so they might have solved the issue now.
Lloytron @ May 15th 2008 2:58AM
It already has WMV support, but it doesn't support WMV DRM protected files
B3 @ May 15th 2008 2:15AM
I got no problems, except i noticed my ps3 gta4 is blurry vs my cousins xbox360. i noticed that it seems to get dark alot too! but my cousins 360 has had 2 failures already lol. ill stick with the ps3!
teej @ May 15th 2008 12:32PM
owning a 360 is awesome. if it fails, you get a chance to play that new MMO while you wait for it to be repaired...it's called Outside. it's sooo sweet.
HolyMary @ May 15th 2008 2:56AM
Hooray! Hooray! its a corporations day ! hahaha nice I love it....
Boney M
Bob @ May 15th 2008 3:29AM
They'll fix it sooner or later, just not now. Unfortunately, it is one of the most popular titles.
Septimus @ May 15th 2008 4:16AM
Odd, not had one single issue with GTA IV. A friend who replaced his HDD says he sometimes gets dropped frames (noticeable) but I haven't seen any of that either. Also I have kept auto sign in on.
Want to put a 320GB in PS3, but after hearing about these issues I'm going to leave it for a while.
Kevin @ May 15th 2008 4:19AM
It froze twice during the combined roughly 80 hours of playtime between me and my brothers. I just finished it tonight. It's a pretty rewarding feeling.
marcus @ May 15th 2008 4:22AM
The only problems I've had is online. When I try to start a deathmatch I get the message, "The connection was lost" or something like that. I got the update and it still boots me out of MP. Any ideas?
b33eazy @ May 15th 2008 4:29AM
I'm so happy I got this game on my 360. My friend had the same freezing problems, but he traded in his ps3 version for the 360 version and he no longer have any more problems. Also, he probably did that because of that DLC as well. It's rumored to be a city and that will sure be awesome, if true.
Jake @ May 15th 2008 7:35AM
360 version is inferior, how does it feel playing the gimped 360 version?
Ian Rendall @ May 15th 2008 10:18AM
@ Jake
You ignorant bastard.
Wwhat @ May 15th 2008 8:07AM
Perhaps it's time to re-spin the PS3 as 'a blu-ray player that also does some games somewhat', what with the lower resolution textures constantly and the crashes now.
Of course that would mean you can't call it the PS3 anymore because the P is play, but you can insert 'blu-ray' and make it PBRS3 play-blu-ray-station, perhaps make the 3 into 1 too since it's the first one that plays blu-ray, making it PBRS1.
Randy @ May 15th 2008 8:47AM
I thought console gaming was the wave of the future and PC gaming was dying.....
*SNICKER*
PC forever!
Ninjakamster (PSN: Chin-Poh) @ May 15th 2008 8:54AM
Damn it, I need a patch or something.
My 60gb PS3 was running it just fine until I finished the first Little Jacob mission and then it would freeze randomly.
Now just last night, it won't even boot up the game! It either gives me a cannot start error or freezes during the intro. Now the game is unplayable.
Is it the disc or a hardware problem because it went from freezing to now cannot even launch the darn thing.
Too bad its my only PS3 game so far, I can't try other PS3 games on it but my PS2 games are still working.
This isn't good at alll!!
digitallysick @ May 15th 2008 9:28AM
i had the freezing problem, to fix it, just turn the internet off, then it should load. I finally went and deleted the data (not game saves) let it re install with the internet off, and then turned the net back on, i haven't had a problem since
Peter @ May 15th 2008 9:52PM
To anyone else who's confused about what the issue is now, there were two freezing problems. One had a workaround of this very simple approach (disable internet/PSN/etc) until they released the 1.01 patch which fixed that. The other is MUCH more serious - the PS3 hardware itself has some problem. Sony hasn't come out and said that, but they are _replacing_ our PS3's as a result (not the game but the PS3 itself, even out of warranty - that would be the "solution that should resolve the issue" that they were referring to). Rockstar confirmed they had not tested GTA4 on the original PS3 hardware with the EE chip, so it seems related to that. In any case, if you get more than 30 minutes into the game, you're probably not experiencing this issue (most of us only get about 5 min into the game before it locks up so hard you have to manually flip the PS3's power).
shoman24v @ May 15th 2008 9:53AM
No, my console is better.
Johnb @ May 15th 2008 9:57AM
i never seen any of my games crash on the ps3, but on my 360 demos/any games installed on the hdd mainly ffxi online tend to crash
Alexandre Perreault @ May 15th 2008 10:48AM
Ok. I Dont understand what's the problem with GTA IV and the PS3, but i got a PS3 1st generation buy in novembre 2006, and i have play GTA IV for average 50hours since i got it and i have never see any problem of loading or whatever
GTA IV run very nice on my ps3
steedums @ May 15th 2008 11:04AM
i get this lock up issue every now and then, but i just take the game out and blow on it for a while, and then it works
tiuk @ May 15th 2008 11:24AM
Only had it freeze once on my 360, while loading a mission. Speaking of which, does the hard drive install on the PS3 eliminate or at least reduce the loading times? It's extremely annoying.