Having owned consoles and relatively powerful PC's for the majority of my life so far (thanks be to God) - I have learnt a tough lesson on GTA IV when it came out on the PC. I had initially bought the game for the XBOX 360 and it played really well. Then, when it came out on PC I made sure I had a monster of a PC to run it. When I finally managed to install it, the game ran terribly, as was expected from a Rockstar console port to PC. Even though they swore it was built for the PC from the ground up.
A couple of years later and thousands of rands "invested" in my PC, I am finally able to run the game at NEAR max settings. Take into consideration that my PC specs now blows the recommended specs they had for the game back then out of the water, and I'm still not able to run the game max'ed out, and even with the years gone by and patches released, the game is still unstable and crashed quite often. So at the end of the day, I ended up owning both versions of GTA IV, one for the XBOX 360 and the other for PC. Then, the kicker - Games For Windows Live for the PC. That literally killed the experience and in the end my console version won hands down. Thank flippen goodness they killed satan's spawn which is known as GFWL.
I don't think I'll buy another GTA game for the PC again. Which is sad, because you can see the opportunities which it affords. The only reason I could justify someone buying the game for the PC is because they simply don't own a console.
