A superb single-player story mode and online support for up to 16 players have all been mercilessly slaughtered by bugs.
The confusion doesn't end when the game finally goes full-screen. If you're using a widescreen monitor, you still get a 4:3 image. Not pillarboxed, no, that would be too easy. Instead, the 4:3 image is zoomed in so you see only the middle section of it. Since quite a bit of the interface is in that "safe" area, this wasn't apparent at first, so I ended up not realizing there was even a way to change graphics settings in-game. I had to start playing to realize that yes, something was wrong with the graphics, considering none of the textures, models, or anything at all loaded.
One Control-Alt-Delete later, I went back in the game and discovered that I could scroll up and down along the larger-than-my-screen image by moving my cursor to the edge of the screen. Wow! Imagine that! Why the hell would this display mode be considered useful at all? It's like Rockstar was trying to imitate the iPhone the same way Battlefield Earth used dutch angles.
Having found the graphics settings, I set my aspect ratio to 16:10 (as opposed to "Auto", which produced the pan-scanning annoyance), lowered the screen resolution to something more reasonable, kept the graphics settings on Medium (attempts to set them to "High" were met with an return to "Medium" about a millisecond later), and fired up the game.
I was distracted from the excellent voice acting and the creative display of the credits during the intro movie by the fact that the framerate started at a choppy 15-22 and quickly dropped to about 5 on average. When I was finally given control of a car, the framerate did not pick up.
Jumping into the options menu again, I lowered the resolution to 854 by whatever, turned render quality to Low (textures wouldn't go down while in-game, and I wasn't about to try to quit to the main menu because I wasn't interested in watching the intro again), and turned all the "density" settings down significantly. Applied settings, refreshed the screen, back in the game.
I was treated to a similarly choppy slideshow, except with jaggier and blurrier graphics.
If controlling the car was difficult enough in this situation, I can't imagine being in a high-speed chase or heated firefight.
No. Not acceptable. A system with a dual core processor and a video card released just over a year ago should not have such trouble running a game, especially at some of the lowest technically possible graphics settings. I'm not even going to get into the idiocy of the DRM, Social Club and Games For Windows stuff, because I was not interested in playing the game long enough to run into the inevitable headaches they'd give me.
It's a real shame, because the console versions of GTAIV have been praised for their immersion and writing, which are two things I'm a sucker for in a game. However, I'd like to actually be capable of playing it.
Yes, I know it's hard to port things to a completely different OS, let alone processor architecture, and yes, I know that games still haven't overcome the hurdle of being viewable on any PC/console/player like movies have. But if Rockstar felt like selling us something for 50 bucks, they could have at least made it work on maybe 90% of PCs you'd expect a gamer to own.
I really wish I could review this game on its gameplay. I never got to experience that, though.