However, there was a slight problem there. While the Playstation version arrived in Fall of 2004, the Xbox and PC versions did not arrive for another six months. Thus, I had to endure the occasionally unbearable wait while the game developers finalized the computer version. However, June 7th eventually arrived, and I headed down to the local Media Play to purchase myself a copy, after first triple-checking the specs on my computer to ensure that it would play correctly. After all: stores do not let you return opened PC games, and I did not want to waste fifty dollars for a game that I couldn't play. However, all of the specs on my computer were fine, even the graphics card which I was slightly worried about, after my Enter The Matrix Graphics Card Incident. Thus, confident in the knowledge that the game would play perfectly on my computer's hardware, I shelled out the fifty dollars and took it home, immediately ripping it open and installing it on my computer.
And it did play perfectly on my computer. Once. Here is what happened. I installed the game from the dvd, and was quite amazed when it loaded up with no random errors or crash screens telling me that I was screwed beyond all hope of recovery. As such, I spent a couple blissful hours playing the game, enjoying the open-ended gameplay and cool new game mechanics. Then, I had to turn off the computer and go run some errands. Returning to my computer and deciding to play the game once more, I put in the dvd and clicked on the shortcut to play the game. Nothing Happened. Let me repeat that: Nothing Happened!.
GTA San Andreas:
The current bane
of my existence.
Here, I was at a bit of a loss as to what I should do. I knew that this was something different than a graphics or sound issue, because I was able to play the game and it played perfectly. Except it only played once. So, I figured that it might be a problem with installing it, as something could have been corrupted or moved around when playing it. (even though I tried to convince myself of this, I had a sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that the problems were far worse than that) However, attempting to keep a positive attitude about the experience, I proceeded to uninstall and then reinstall the game. Now, mind you, this game clocks in at 4.7 gigabytes, and so is about a twenty minute install. After the wait while the game loaded itself onto my computer, I tried to play it once more. It did not work.
Now I was beginning to see some more problems that hinted at something not being right. For one, most modern computer games will have an autorun feature that will automatically pull up a screen with options whenever you put in the game disc. This game had that, but it did not completely work. With GTA games such as Vice City, the autorun screen will automatically come up, you click on the "Install Game" button, and once the game is installed it will automatically return you to that intital autorun screen, from which you can then play the game. That did not happen here. After installing the game, the screen would not appear. Clicking on the shortcut to the game on the Windows desktop also did nothing, as a little CD icon would appear that would supposedly mean that the system was reading the disc, but nothing would happen. I finally did manage to play the game, this time by heading to the actual location where it was installed and clicking on the .exe icon. If that was what I had to do to play the game, I was alright with that. Of course, it is never that easy.
Although the game did play that time, the next time I tried to play it, this little workaround did not work. Now I was beginning to think it was a problem with the DVD rom, possibly something that prevented it from being read by my DVD drive. So, I uninstalled the game and took it back to Media Play to get an exchange for a new copy. Media Play exchanged it with no questions asked, but I figured this would not work. And I was right. It did not work once I finished installing it, proving that something within my computer was causing the problems. So, I finally admitted defeat after a total of three reinstalls of the game, and sent an e-mail to the Rockstar Games tech support detailing my problem.
After a couple of weeks, I finally received a reply, which was more of an automated response with a massive list of all the things that could result in the game not playing. Looking through this list, I finally figured that the problem was my DVD drive. Apparantly the San Andreas DVD utilizes a type of copy protection, which will not be read correctly with older DVD drives. When this happens, the game reads the legitimate DVD as a bootleg DVD, and so does not play it. And so, in short, I was screwed. I was unable to play this game on my computer, unless I wanted to fork over the seventy or more dollars for a new DVD drive which I would then have to install myself. And although I am proficient with computer hardware, I figured that would be just another disaster waiting to happen.
However, this torrid tale of tragedy eventually ended as I found a delightfully simple solution to my problem: I bought an Xbox.
UPDATE: So, when I purchased a new computer, I decided to try and install GTA yet again. I still had the DVD around, since I was unable to sell it back to any used game store. Now, I was not expecting very much, since my new computer doesn't even have a real graphics card, just some small onboard ATI chipset. I was expecting this to be the point of failure, but the thing played perfectly. Many times. None of the problems I had with the previous computer happened here. So. What the fuck. So now my new computer is my gaming rig, so to speak.
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