DAMN! All of that to load/play a game? Are you sure you're making it right. :P

yep... if I skip any one of those steps it will either crash the game, disable half the graphics options, or drop multiplayer. This game is easily one of the worst ports I've ever seen.

Wow...this release has been a disaster. The Rockstar Social Club doesn't work...actually crashes the game. People can't change graphics settings, huge memory leak problems all over the place that reduce it to a stuttering mess in 10 minutes...Rockstar has actually released a .doc file listing the 38 Windows crash codes people are gularly seeing and what they mean. Half are for old drivers, old DirectX, stuff like that...the other half seem to be the result of really shoddy coding.
Congrats, Rockstar, you may be on the way to becoming EA 2, with this mess following up the awful translation of Bully to PC.

Well, even if the game wasn't infected with SecuROM and riddled with technical problems, Yahtzee's review of Saints Row 2 convinced me that that's probably more fun to play. I'll probably buy that when the PC version comes out in January, depending on what DRM it uses.
If you don't know Yahtzee and his "Zero Punctuation" review series, I highly recommend watching the whole lot. Even for games you don't know and don't care about. They're friggin' hilarious! :-D

+1. Funny, funny stuff (I think the Medal of Honor : Airborne one is still my personal favorite).

I just took a look at a few popular torrent sites and WOW GTA4 is getting pirated a lot. It might be up there with Spore as the most pirated game ever.
It's like EA and Rock* are in a competition to see how many PC gamers they can piss off.

Well, it's a comfort to know that it's more taxing on your machine than Crysis.

Just bought the game. It's a huge pain in the ass to install and even play. Anybody got any link where I can download a cracked exe? :P
The game is great, no doubt about it. But why must Rockstar Social Club start before I can play? Why must I sign in to Games For Windows Live before I can even SAVE the game? That means for a single player junkie like me to play, I must be online.
Thanks Rockstar for making me feel like your bitch.

OMG PIR8!!!
But seriously, that just proves that DRM is about as effective at stopping piracy as paper is at stopping a bullet. What's funny is that EA wanted to take over Rockstar. Now Rockstar is trying to be EA v2. They should have just let EA buy them out then we'd only have one brand of asshole to deal with.

I have it on 360, but I bought it anyway for PC. Have it, hate it.

The load this game puts on your system is outrageous...there is no way this title should be taxing people's computers as hard as it is. This looks like a quick and dirty port job just in time for Christmas.

Is there another kind?
Oh, you mean you think companies who sell PC games should make actual PC games? What a novel concept. Or rather, what an old and obvious concept, that most of the major players in the gaming industry have long since abandoned. Which, I think, is one of the major reasons so many of them appear to be having trouble with the PC market. They're quick to shout "OMG, piracy!", but really, who'd want to pirate the crap they sell these days?

As owner of the PS3 version, I can tell you that much: If you expect Rockstar to fix the problems after release, you are sadly mistaken. The PS3 version has been out for a while and it still is in a less than satisfactory state. Slow as hell (I'd say about 15 to 20 fps and it's not even FullHD) at most times, with occasional drops to around 3 fps if there are any physics involved; dozens of clipping errors on cars; missing animations (for example your character leans when turning while running. Nothing wrong with that. But it shouldn't be done by simply rotating the entire model around); a physics engine that apparently thinks that good cars should be made of jello, and lots more.
However, there haven't been any updates that changed the actual engine. At least not in any way that's noticeable.
A shame, because the game itself is pretty good, but the engine they made is worse than the one they bought for the previous installments.

DMC4 on the PC was pretty decent, GRAW2 has been completely redone for PC.
Yeah, that's both of the possible exceptions, I think.