Asked whether or not the otherwise brilliant GTA IV had any glitches, Take-Two"s Strauss Zelnick laughed and said, "No, none whatsoever. I"d say the only issue is that someone came up to me yesterday in a restaurant and said ‘my thumbs are hurting from the weekend.’”

I"ve had only minor issues with GTA IV, but issues nonetheless, in the form of the "freezing" problem we blogged about a few days ago. At the time of that blog, I had encountered no problems with my 60GB PlayStation 3 and GTA IV, so I thought I was in the clear because most people were reporting that the issue popped up as early as the opening cut scenes.

But during a later session, the game locked up during a cut scene: the picture froze, but the audio continued. So I reset the PS3. Then it froze shortly after during a mission. Then I reset it. Then it froze during a loading screen. Reset. Freeze. Reset. Freeze.

I followed the "12-step" fix that Take-Two itself offered for the "glitchless" game (really, I just deleted the PS3"s Internet cache) and the freezing stopped.

For one session.

Next session, it froze at the loading screen. Again.

"Reset. Freeze. Reset. Freeze" only takes a second to read, but when it"s happening when you"re trying to game, you end up screwing with the thing trying to get it to work for 45 minutes or an hour instead of playing.

Eventually, I uninstalled the game from the hard drive, reinstalled and haven"t had a problem since. (I suppose Ken Kutaragi was right--PS3 really is a PC!)

But I wonder just how many people are having this problem. It doesn"t seem super-uncommon, at least with people who have 60GB PS3s.

UPDATE - Eurogamer is reporting that there may be a patch for the PS3 version coming today... hope it solves these problems...

UPDATE 2 - Rockstar has issued a patch for PS3"s online play issues.

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