Archive for July 6, 2005

I finally got a chance to start playing my copy of The Sims 2 last week… This was after buying it, on the 17th of June, at the Apple Store located here in Plano. The day after that I started on my overhaul of the KittiCo Cat Rescue web site, so installing/playing the game was put on the back burner until after I finished it. Well, on Wednesday (6/22) I finally had a spare moment to install the game… I took the plastic wrap off the box, slid the contents out, and then noticed that the game now comes on a DVD instead of a CD. *sigh* Why can’t software companies put a big "Requires a DVD drive to play" sticker, or something like that, on the front of the box until they’re sure that the majority of people have them? I did not have a DVD drive in my computer just a plain old CD-RW one. Like most Macintosh people, I keep my computer a lot longer than most PC owners do, and a combo drive (DVD/CD RW) was not yet a standard item on the Power Macintosh G4 then. This lack of a DVD drive was the same problem we ran into when we upgraded to Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) at the beginning of June. Thankfully Pookey has a combo drive in his ibook, so he just slaved my computer to his, and installed the new OS without any other problems, but that wouldn’t cut it this time.

So, obviously it was time for me to upgrade my drive… After Pookey & I did a search online for one we finally decided on a LaCie DVD±RW Internal Drive with LightScribe. Pookey did most of the installation, with some minor assisting from me, but my biggest job was keeping Morgan away from the temptation of my open computer. That, in itself, was much more difficult than helping Pookey! It was a fairly simple installation because of my Mac’s swing-open side door. Apple definitely succeeded when they set out to design a computer that was easy to add/upgrade computer components in. The only thing that went awry was that near the end of the installation, the lights went out. *sigh* You can read about it in depth on Pookey’s blog here. We ended up finishing the installation by battery-operated lantern/flash light. When the lights eventually came back on we were able to see that the new drive worked perfectly from the moment we turned the computer on; like it was meant to. All without the tedious driver installation you’d have to do on a PC. That’s why I love my Mac.

Though, after playing The Sims 2 I’m not quite sure I like it better than the original one. Sure, they’ve added some really neat stuff (I especially like the toddler sims, the graphics quality, the pools with the underwater lights…) to the game, but there’s a lot of things I don’t like about it. Here are my primary complaints:

1. I don’t like the way game action is viewed, the vantage point is too low for my liking, and it’s also much harder to get into the perfect spot to view most of the house.
2. It runs a lot slower than the original game on my computer, but a processor upgrade (Pookey: Hint, hint…) would probably help that.
3. I have a ton of add ons (household furnishings, floor/wall patterns, etc.) for my original The Sims game, and diddley squat for my new one. Plus, installing those add ons is a lot more difficult in The Sims 2, as they now have a whole separate program (Package Installer) to do that.
4. They’ve changed some of the short-cut keys (i.e. the ‘tab’ key used to make you go up/down a floor, now you need to use the page up/down buttons.), and I don’t understand why they needed to do this… If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!
5. There’s no robot maid, and no stair replacing teleporter!!!

I’ll probably warm up to it eventually, but who knows, stranger things have happened… But I’d bet my bottom dollar that in a few months I’ll be raving about how much I love it.