So, another night last night of not being able to connect to the multiplayer meant it was back to single player, but TSA fell victim of the dreaded freezing bugs for the first time. Mid way through a mission, the game froze: audio continuing but the PS3 needed a hard reset.
We’re now placing all hope in this forum post, in which an apparent Mike Richards (claiming to be from Rockstar) says that we should be ‘alert around 12:00 GMT tomorrow for a patch for both the 360 and ps3 versions of GTA IV – we’ve been working ’round the clock to fix this issue, and seem to have found the problem.‘
He goes on: ‘For those of you who care, we render the screen in the backbuffer and then flip it onto the front buffer. During those freezes, the code hits a glitch and stops flipping – the reason some of you manage to only have freezes for a few seconds while the sound still runs.‘
However, this is a most unorthodox way of addressing what appears to be such a major issue, so we’re not confident this is the real thing at all. We’ll ask Rockstar ourselves this morning and get back to you.