More Awesome Than You!

So, tired at last of giving my hard-earned cash to a USian tax-avoiding mega-corp, I loaded up BitTorrent, sidestepped my ISPs puny anti-piracy blocks and obtained copies of EPs Generations, Pets, Showtime, & Supernatural.

I backed up my registry, docs and program files and began installing.

Generations and Pets installed without incident and worked fine.

Showtime and Supernatural likewise installed without issue. You might see evidence of an impatient idiot. Guilty as charged of installing two EPs without checking the first actually worked.

Anyway. Supernatural won't start. I got a Windows error message about failed initialisation.

Obviously the Supernatural failure is not down to tight pants. I have no reason to believe the Showtime/Supernatural files are faulty. I have rolled back my installation to its pre-Generation state and I'll reinstall the EPs one by one, testing each thoroughly before backing up and proceeding (I might be an idiot but I try to avoid being totally stupid).

Meanwhile I am open to suggestions concerning troubleshooting the issue, if it recurs.

Either that or point and laugh and poke me with rusty sporks. Neither Google nor the Games4theWorld forums have thrown up any useful intel, and I am sure this is an odd registry issue.

Note. I am using a fresh install of Windows, so the registry is as spotless as any Windows registry can be; at least as far as Sims are concerned.

Use the superpatcher, update all your drivers etc

Not sure the superpatcher would fix it, but I guess it's worth trying anyway. Drivers etc. are still in damp ink mode because of fresh install. The first task after Windows installation grinds to an end is to  install latest drivers for all components.

One oddity. After rolling back my files, I had the same damned error trying launch my original game set up. Fixed it with a manual uninstall in the registry ... not a fix I can see how to do with a non-working Supernatural if all EPs and SPs are already installed!

If you cracked any of the games, you are indeed screwed. There are many torrents that come with a simple click to install the entire game; which would mean it cracks itself automatically. Cracks and patches hate one another. You mentioned Games4theWorld, who always cracks their games and their weird "fix" thing. I would never recommend restoring back as it causes more problems with Sims 3 or any other program. The restore point is meant for if you borked your entire computer.

A.) You should delete every registry file left over after a clean uninstall of all Sims 3 traces, and then install the base game only.
B.) Patch the base game to the latest update with the super patch and then install the EPs one-by-one in order (release date).
C.) Never crack and make sure all games are compatible.

You could have possibly mixed up the regions - a Worldwide (7) will conflict with a North American (1) or European (2) etc. I would get the games from the exact same source since most torrents usually skip over the region number. Rachelstoolbox has been my supplier since she started in demonoid; I believe she now continues her work in Kickass Torrents. I suspect you are new to torrenting in general and you should direct torrent concerns there or weird installation problems in MTS. Do not mention getting games off the internet in MTS as that will trigger the warez ban. Tehparadox is full of support for your kind as well. Once your registry notes your serial number is xxx-xx-xxx and you try to install the same thing with yyy-yy-yyy, many problems will arise along with the mismatched region numbers. It's better to get a clean slate than manually messing around with the registry. Additionally, if you let Showtime update your game for you instead of patching it ahead of time, Showtime is set by default to f*** everything over.

On a side note, you really shouldn't be proud of your lack of intelligence around here. The consequence of such an offense includes being burnt at the stake.

I don't know if this is of any use, but I seem to recall one of the torrents for that EP having a strange method of installation. Initially, it can appear installed when in fact many of the required files for the game to run aren't actually present (until taking some further steps).

Occasionally (especially with early releases, as it seems), you may have to install the game using the standard installer, and then copy over Game/GameData/Thumbnails folders into the install directory manually. If you notice you have both an Installer folder and a couple folders that look familiar from other EP install directories, that's probably the case.

If you want to go the cutlass route try games4theworld have arr'd a couple of games from there and they tend to make sure they have a solid working copy, I can say everything from Katy Perry up to Supernatural  for the sims 3 from there works fine.