The PC version comes on DVD only and is packaged with a fully bound book that serves as the manual. It's definitely some of the coolest PC game packaging around. This version also has the potential to be the best-looking version of the game by a long shot. Support for higher resolutions makes the textures and characters look sharper and much better than either of the console versions. There's a draw distance slider that, when turned all the way up, almost totally eliminates the draw-in and fogging that's become synonymous with the series. Your Grove Street home looks much more like a run-down South Central neighborhood when you can see more of its surroundings. But all this graphical quality is offset by some serious problems with the sound. Testing on three different machines that exceed the recommended system specs got us three results. On one machine, we didn't experience any audio glitches. On another, the audio simply cut out a lot, leaving you to drive around with only music to keep you company. It's tough to play when you can't hear your mission descriptions. On the third machine, loading up a save game caused a loud grating noise--which sounded like the bike-riding audio mixed with a helicopter--to scream out from the middle of the Grove. We had to hop in a car and drive away from the area to make the noises stop. Also, the cutscenes occasionally desynched from the audio, making the lip movement appear to be way off.
Control in the PC version is full of options. You can decide to hook up a dual analog gamepad so that you can play it just like the console versions, or you can instead opt for mouse-and-keyboard control. Either method works, though we had several cases where the game would simply stop responding to any mouse input until we alt-tabbed out of the game, moved the mouse, and then jumped back in. This isn't exactly the sort of thing you want to have happen in the middle of a shoot-out. Mouse control also removes the lock-on aspect of the targeting, giving you easy access to manual targeting. The refined control the mouse gives you seems like an unfair advantage at times, because it's very easy to rack up one-shot kills by aiming for the head. If you have a smooth mouse hand, even the roughest firefights are really basic...provided the mouse doesn't die on you.
