GTA3_game hanging.
 

I was wondering if anyone has had any problems with gta3 hanging. Although my kids have managed to put a few scratches on the bottom of the disc, as soon as you start to play the game, ie drive the car, the floor/road goes blue, then it says disc error and crashes.
Electronics Boutique don't want to know as they say its down to the disc being scratched,but I am not entirely convinced.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

it is most probably from the disc being scratched, unless you have similar probs with other games. why don't you think it is because of the scratch?
pretty obvious!

did it work ok before the scratches?
if it did its the scratches
sony will replace it (upto 1 year old) but at cost of £20 (well it was £20)

GTA3 is notorious for this. You'll find a few posts from me and others on this subject. I have concluded that it is badly pressed. You'd have to take it to your local Trading Standards Office in order to have it checked against the ECMA requirement for DVD-R. Or you can download the NERO benchmark program and via a DVD-ROM on your PC put the DVD through its paces. In fact I think I'll do that.

The situation was eased as follows:

1 I cleaned the lens - that got rid of the read error
2 I had the laser recalibrated - that made loading faster
3 I switched to a different PS2 - problem appears to have gone away with that calibration