I am also having the sudden game freeze problem. My console should be up to date with all the necessary ioses to run from the hdd, but about 1 to up to three hours into the game, while entering or leaving the skylight market or the cave where I rescued the bird at, I get to a white or black screen.
I should mention: although I began playing the backup, I own the game but just didn't want to open the box.
So, of course I wondered if the problem was just with the backup, so I put in my original (I really, really didn't want to take it out of its original packaging), and sure enough, the game still freezes after some gameplay, about an hour or two in.
None of my other games r doing this, so I'll lay around with patches like iOS reload block and such.
But again, this also happens with the Original under 4.3u. This one in particular is letterbomb softmodded. I'll try updating some other wads and ioses to see if that helps, but I just can't figure out why the original also fails. :-/