I’m really having fun with GTA IV, regardless of my questions about the review scores its been getting. There has been a couple of weird things happening to me as I play it. 2 bugs in particular. One in particular almost made me stop playing. The other is one that Ive seen plenty of times in numerous games.

Bug number 1 (the easy one)

This is more of a graphic glitch. I know everyone has had an experience one time or another when you’re playing a game and your character falls behind the game world. Well that has happened to me several times when playing GTA IV. The first time it happened I wont mention here because it would involve spoilerish materials. However, heres the spoiler free example.

When I leave the safe house, I always jump over the banister instead of walking around to get to the front of the stairs. One time, I logged on to play, ran out of the safe house and jumped over the banister. Instead of landing on the bottom of the stairs like I usually do, I fell over the front door of the apartment building and ended up in an all pink and purple area, behind the game world with just the outside of the apartment door. I can run around in that area and see the geometry  of the apartment in front of me but the part I am in isn’t part of the game. This has happened to me about 3 times, twice while doing a mission. Lucky enough, all I had to do is walk back through the door and everything goes back to normal. Yea its annoying but at least I didn’t die or have to restart the 360.

Bug number 2 (the hard one)

GTA-IV-Box-ArtAfter standing in line in the middle of the night to pick up GTA IV, I went home and loaded the game. I played for an hour and 17 minutes and turned it off. The next day I played for about 2 or 3 hours, then later on that night I played most of the night. Finishing all of the first set of missions and getting pretty far in the next part of the story. Of coarse I casually played, doing other things that were available along with missions.

I didn’t get a chance to play the game anymore until Friday night. I loaded up GTA IV and started in the safe house as usual. Then I walked outside and noticed that the mission marker was there for a set of missions I had long finished. Thinking "ooo more missions at that place? lets check it out" I start that missions and noticed it was the first mission I had done at that place. Thinking the wrong save game file was loaded, I went to the load screen to get my current save game and the only save file was the one at 1 hour 17 minutes.

Id guess about 8 hours of game play was gone. I don’t know what happened. I know the games were saved earlier cause I had 3 sessions of play which all picked up from where I left off. Each game play session was on the same 360 but at different locations (I brought the 360 with me everywhere for a few days). I almost stopped playing, but Saturday I decided to pick it back up again. Im now back at the point where I shouldve been when my save games were lost.

Has anyone else had any problems like this? just curious.