OK, so I know I'm months behind in the expansion packs (it gives me time to assess if the new game is worth the money, and it gives EA time to fix all the bugs), but I'm just beginning to get used to Nightlife and so it's time to look at the next interesting EP. I'll never go for pets but OfB looks like fun. If you have it, how often do you use the business side of things? What other features are added that Nightlife didn't have (Is lockable doors one of them? Cos I bet that would come in handy!) Any nice new messes? Anything that the wiki page doesn't include, like awful gameplay? I figured you guys would give me an honest opinion rather than those at the TS2 forums or the BBS...

I've had Sims be promoted before through "contacts" they've made - say a Sim they had a dream date with. One Sim had just been promoted and needed 2 more friends and a total of 5 more skill points to get promoted again, but after a dream date with another Sim in the same career got promoted anyway with the explanation that "<insert name here> has pulled some strings"

The butterfly one confuses me, the interior and exterior shots don't seem to match up around the head.

How about problems for us who don't have every expansion pack to date? I've heard those with Seasons but without Pets get the wolf noises at night. I'm willing to bet that the weather system on vaction lots will be so borked that those of us without Seasons won't be able to play them without some major fix - eg missing interactions, or the game assuming the weather stuff is there and tries to use it, but it isn't there. I can see lots of conflicts coming my way. Also, all the bugs that Pets and Seasons introduced will be "fixed" for those with those EPs, but introduced to those who don't - eg the crying baby thing. Eurgh.

If you're just looking for the items & clothes, may I draw your attention to SaraMK's sig:

Well I've been playing with this house all afternoon and I'm impressed. It required very little furniture rearrangement (I like to play without rotating the view all the time) and the sims seem to move around without any complaint. It takes quite awhile for the kids to get to the school bus if they're upstairs as the car pools only seem to sit at the far right (as you look from the front of the house)? Weird.

Yey a base game house! It's hard to find lots now-a-days that aren't built with Pets or Seasons. Looks good too!

Um... IS there a door from the master bedroom to the rest of the house? I can't see one. If it's on the wall that you can't see the face of, then there's a chair blocking it. I'd love a cock house, if it actually worked.

Wait. I was under the impression that the Uni added careers couldn't be added as LTWs? Does that mean that with this hack, and nothing else affecting LTWs, that they are now avaliable as LTWs for my sims?

Should've guessed the pokemon tent was feeEssen. A quote from an on looker:

Maybe not Brokeass, but here's an entry from the same gal who gave us the tiger themed rooms and eats.

Now you can have tiger neon lights too! Yey!

Vol-au-vents. They remind me of the ones my Gran makes every Christmas. Eurgh. Except puff pastry isn't usually pink.

Oh, and I'd quite like a bookcase that did THAT in real life. It'd be great.

Is it OK for pre-seasons?

What's up with those teen Sims from RealSims? Surely that's image distortion? And the one on the far right? What's happened to her top?

Oh, and you missed one:


Some of these really are awful. I wonder if the "artists" are going for "real" or "fantasy"?

Dang. Any idea if they're still useable in a Uni + NL setup? Don't mind that there's content missing, I just want the basic building and features.

Looks good, but why are the non Uni EPs needed?

I've heard that installing seasons forces you to patch pets, likewise when installing celebrations. Don't have experience of this tho as I don't have the lastest games.

Any idea how old a driver I need? I've tried the latest (v93.xx Nov 06) and one that had a different build number (v84.xx Mar 06). Do I really need to go back to autumn 05 when the EP was released? 'cos I'm sure that'll screw with other games I have installed under Windows. The game seems to just crash at random when a new thing occurs eg change the "wall up - wall down" settings. If it was just crashing in CAS I could live with that.

*sigh* This is my fiance's old computer which he custom built. He didn't optimise it for gaming... so that could be my problem. I mean, he did change because it became old and unstable. I just thought "hey, it actually has a supported graphics card, it'll play the Sims like a dream" Enough with my rambling anyway. Thanks for the help, and I'll try an older driver tomorrow.

Update: Went into Pleasantview for the first time... the game crashed with a "this application will now terminate" error when the in game camera was doing that "sweep the neighbourhood" thing. So I'm guessing this is a graphics problem. Which sounds like rubbish to me - my old not recomended on-board graphics never let the game crash. Saying that though, the graphics seem a lot cleaner and shiny now. *off to find older drivers, as suggested*

It makes sense that my first post should be an "oops I broke it" post, doesn't it?

I have a fresh install with base game, uni and nightlife, with the nightlife patch. I restarted the computer after each installation, like the good little windows user I am  . No hacks or custom content at all. The game is crashing in the "create a student" screen after about 30 seconds of making a Sim. Checked in other neighbourhoods and in "create a family" - it seems to be only "create a student" causing the problem. After 30 seconds of creating a Sim student, one of two things happen. Either the computer restarts or one of those horrid Windows errors with the red cross pops up saying "This game will now close". Real helpful, huh?

Computer specs:

40 Gb harddrive space on my WinXP partition
1 Gb RAM
nVidia GeForce 6200 graphics card (which has 256 Mb RAM associated with it) with latest drivers (including DX 9.0)

Never played the Sims on this computer before. My old computer, which had much lower specs than this (intel on-board graphics, lower RAM), didn't have this problem. I know that there is a problem with nVidia drivers at the moment, but I thought that was only to do with the latest EPs? 

Any thoughts?