so i finally got to playing the sims 3. after a horrible time installing it.

i got rid of the “borrowed” copy and made sure that it was completely eradicated before i installed the legit copy.. don’t need any sorts of piracy speeches, it was my intent to buy it all along just had to wait for my birthday uninstallation went fine and there were no problems. i then installed the new game and promptly went to patch it. for some reason EA did not think to make the updates available from their launcher just the newest update which is dumb.. because fresh out of the box, the sims 3 requires THREE full patches to update it to the version that is considered “stable” now. so i had to run around like a headless chicken trying to acquire the updates from various websites that provide videogame updates. bad idea! when updating the sims 3 always ALWAYS remember to make sure of the region your patch is for. if you are in the US, take the time to make sure your patch is also US. otherwise you will get all kinds of annoying INVALID FILE errors and freak out, as i did.. i uninstalled the game once thinking i had borked something, only to find later that the patch i’d downloaded was not the correct region…  but finally i got the damn thing patched up.

so i install all my custom content, and store stuff.. and everything goes in just fine and dandy, lets play the game!

first order of business when playing a new game is always to go in and fiddle with preferences.. and since i have my nice new graphics card, i decided to bump up some things and test how much i could push it before it crashed. no crashes on full but turning on anti-aliasing made the tops of my sims hair missing! so then i spent about an hour googling around for help on that because i hate jaggy edges and my card does not suck so i should be able to smooth things out without the loss of hair! it turns out i had to manually adjust the anti aliasing settings in my videocard settings and turn off anti-aliased transparent textures. this brought the hair back and made my graphics nice and smooth. *yays*

of course by that time.. i was too tired to play. so i only ended up making sim me and sim Lucas, and plopping us in a house. i then noticed there was a weird skipping issue with the sound.. which i googled later and found was a bug from the new patch.. wonderful :/

i’ve also found that i cannot upload anything to the sims 3 exchange site.. it keeps telling me i have a network error. so all in all right now as it stands, i really prefer the sims 2 still… but we’ll see how it goes.

(yes i did cheat the time on this because i fell asleep while writing it and woke up at midnight which ruins my blog every day goal.)