Done. $15, actually.

There aren't any pre-order codes that I know of. I hesitate to recommend the Official Boards, and it is full of an awful lot of crap, plus the moderators stomp on everything.  But some of the regular posters know a good deal about the game.  MTS also has a dedicated forum.

I like the game, actually, although it is hellishly buggy.  MATY isn't the place to get info about it, though, unless you want TSM items converted for TS3.

No, I meant that the announcement and other preliminary info stated that there would be parrots and falcons.  Visions of parrots rotting away, as they always seem to do.

L &  P: Several Sims sites are reporting that ESRB has already rated an EP called "Pirates and Nobles" and that it's listed as available on several gaming sites starting 8/30/2011.  Some of the reports link to an Amazon page, but the page is gone now.  Personally, I will believe it when I see it.  I don't know why they'd do pirates, unless it's the classic move of "hey!  We had it in all the other games and won't need to do new interactions!" But if the rumors that there is a new EP are true, I hope the rumors that there will be an interrogation chair are also true.  

I think the pets rumors really are rumors, courtesy of the people who have to have goddamn Pets all the time.

EDIT:  SOB!  There really IS an Amazon page!

Edit again:  Yep, it's real, EA announced it via livestream.  And the parrots and falcons are real, too.

The patch also breaks some things (surprise!).  CAS loads extremely slowly: Saved Sims have blank thumbnails.  Saving Sims can take such a long time that it requires a Force Quit.

Some quests appear to be bugged, but then some quests were bugged before.  The *Dangerous Minds* quest doesn't seem to be doable at all any more. I hope that they will fix these, or that a third party will create a fix, as there doesn't seem to be a workaround.

The Bard's stage required a Force Reset in one of my Kingdoms. 

It's a monster patch, and I think they tried to "fix" too much.  Since it added some genetics and aging, I am tempted to mutter "you people and your stupid obsession with your stupid spawnlets." 

I have installed it.  The most obvious changes are:

The camera goes around 360 degrees, making Shimrod's camera mod obsolete for now.
My completed Kingdom now has "Infinite QP."
There is a new Quest for completed Kingdoms, "Free Time With Responsibilities," which can be played with up to four Sims at a time.
There is an option to purchase XP with RP.

Do it the old-fashioned way.  Kill someone. 

"Kids are sometimes eaten by bears. To emphasize, that's devoured—not injured. Children do not survive random bear attacks."

What are you talking about?  That's not a glitch.  That's a FEATURE.

I'm assuming that the kids are supposed to be apprenticed/grow up/go somewhere--not that much different from the random "moved out of the neighborhood" stuff in TS3.  Since the kids don't have any genetics, it doesn't seem to matter, although I suppose you could take careful note of their appearances and recreate them as adults for later use.

Surely it is more fun watching the sparkling ones burst into flames?  Watching them burn is the whole point of having sparkly!vamps at all.

My tech told me once that sounds like that are the computer equivalent of someone banging his head against the wall.  The longer it goes on, the more likely you are to lose data.  They replaced the hard drive and the optical drive, and when it continued to happen, they replaced the entire machine.  In any case, I would get it checked out.

Thank you.  So it sounds as though the NTFS partition is the way to go; I think you have a good point about starting a bit on the large side.  Is there any way to transfer files back and forth?  Would I be able, for example, to save files I needed on a flash drive, reboot, and then pull them off the flash drive?

It does--but it doesn't answer all my questions.  When you install Bootcamp, it gives you the option of partitioning it as NTFS or FAT (yes, even with XP.)  With FAT, the partition is visible on the Mac side and I think you can drag and drop some things, at least in one direction, but you have a limit of 32 GB. With NTFS, you can't.  Also, someone told me that whatever you pick, you're stuck with, so I couldn't make it bigger later.  On the other hand, the same guy told me I needed 12-15 GB of hard drive space to install Windows XP, which seems a little big to me.  I'm coming up with 15.5 GB for the base game and all the EPs, plus 350 MB each for the SPs, and maybe 3-4 GB of CC, which would be about 24 GB, max.  

Snow Leopard evidently has some kind of read-write capacity, but that would mean Snow Leopard, and when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard, my Sims installation became FUBAR'd.  There's also some kind of third party software that enables back and forth writing (Mac Drive.)

Yes, I am a total hypocrite.  Despite everything I've said before, I want to install a Bootcamp partition on my Mac and play from the Windows side.

I have a few questions.

Assuming that I don't run anything but games, and probably only Sims 2, how big a partition do I need?  I currently have about 160 GB of hard drive space and 4 GB of RAM.  This is assuming I am running Windows XP/Leopard, some kind of anti-virus, the base game, all the EPs, several SPs, and some third party software, like SimPE.  At the moment I have about 2.6 GB worth of CC in the Mac version of the game.

I'd like to be able to copy some of my CC on the Mac side (just things like clothes, etc) and transfer it over rather than downloading every single file.  I'd also like to be able to take pictures on the PC partition and transfer them to the Mac partition so that I can use my current versions of Photoshop and MS Office.  Can I do that with a flash drive?

I've heard that the limit for a FAT partition is 32 GB.  Will that be enough, and does it matter?

Any information would be helpful.

I've re-named anti-biting with an "x" and it seems to be one of the older files, so whether it loads by date or name seems to be ok.

With "creature fixes" in, my most recent werewolf still has a memory of the wrong sim turning him into a werewolf, though.  Is that game-frying?

Yes, it's related to the hack.

I do not have creaturefixes in my game, because I don't want it to conflict with Jfade's biting control hack.  (I am a control freak and don't want anyone to bite anyone unless I say so.)  This evening I had a sim turn another sim into a werewolf and the new werewolf got a memory of a different sim turning him into a werewolf.

I'm assuming this is the being turned into a werewolf resulting in memories of random crap glitch.  I can't fix it with SimPE (playing with a Mac, no Sim PE available.) My  questions are:

1) is this harmful, or merely annoying?
2) (and I realize this is related to non-Awesomeware)--if I place creaturefixes in, do I have to take No Biting At All out?
3) If I put creaturefixes in, would it fix the memory problem, or is the damage already done?

Well. . . yes and no.

No, I don't have trouble with the amount of CC I have.  There are a few extremely high-poly items that I've tried which give my game the willies.  Most of them are from SimsDesignAvenue, which makes gorgeous stuff, but some of it is so high poly that I've found it can't be used. I've also had trouble with some stuff by Parsimonious, and I have no idea why.  It's not the usual "Mac owners can't see wall coverings" problem; it's some really freaky stuff with lots.  It may just be coincidence, but after a few times I am too freaked out to try anything new from there.  

What DOES happen is that after a certain number of files, Body Shop starts having trouble:  the mannequin is missing or blanks out.  This can be solved by pulling the non-Body Shop files temporarily.  I don't like doing it, but I keep a folder called "Temp Downlods" and when I need to work with Body Shop, I pull the folders labelled "Buy Mode" "Build Mode" and a few other folders (like "cakes" and "cars.")  Then when I'm done with Body Shop, I put them back.

I also keep a folder labelled "unused cc."  If something is unused for now, but I might want to use it, I stick it in there.  

Especially if you have cats.  One reason I bought my own place is that it was cheaper to let my cats have accidents on my own floors.

Wait what, buying the high chair is harmful to the Sims? How or why?

It's pretty well worthless, I agree, except that you can take a few cute pictures that way.  Frankly, there aren't that many interesting or original pictures you can take of toddlers.  High chair pictures change it up.

I actually don't mind buy wants if my Sims can afford them, for the same reason Pescado stated.  Sometimes it is the only way to get them some aspiration points. I know some people who buy stuff and then stick it in an inaccessible basement so the Sims won't roll it again: if you're sick of seeing "Buy a High Chair," just buy them one and hide it.

Sent small donation yesterday, am cool with being a nameless parsimonious peasant.

Caution:  if you just kill her, he will still be in love with her.  I've had Family Sims roll the want to Fall in Love with and fear of Falling Out of Love with Sims who were quite dead.  "Deleted: Electric Boogaloo!"  might work, but maybe not.

What I want to know is if upgrading will irretrievably fuck up my game.  That's what happened to Sims 2 when I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard.  It turned out that I should have uninstalled the game and reinstalled, because Tiger and Leopard place the game in different places (Tiger put it directly on the HD and Leopard in the Apps folder.)

It took a hell of a long time to see the damage (disappearing lots, Sims stuck at wrong ages, general Armageddon) and still longer to figure out what had caused it.  Plus without Sim PE, rebuilding took forever.  Aspyr had the info on what happened and what to do.

I think it's a legit question.  Personally, I plan on letting someone else jump off the ice floe first. The Sims 3 fora will probably have some threads in the Mac section shrieking about OS and game incompatibility, and there will be zero tech support.  And then there will be a flood of people from the BBS who decide "oooo I don't know what to dooo let's go to MATY."  If there's a dedicated thread, at least we can direct people to that.  Perhaps there will be less threadshitting.

Call me a crazy dreamer.

It's almost always the corn rows, which didn't even look good on Bo Derek.  Thanks for the tip:  usually I just keep my preggers Sims in pjs while they're pregnant.

I try to install a debugger on every lot, even community lots.  If I build the lot myself, I make a special windowless room, where I put the Debugger, BRY, Macrotastics, and whatever posing hacks I might use.  The Sim Blender is on most lots, too, but that I can hide in plain sight. 

Christianlov has a Last Name Changer on MTS2, but you don't really need it with the Debugger or Sim Blender.  Not having access to SimPE on Macs can be a mixed blessing:  you can't fix some things, or edit genetics, or extract sims, but it's also a bit harder to FUBAR things. 

I'm still working on my TS2 Legacy, so I can't imagine putting the little free time I've got into Sims 3.  What's more, a lot of people have been selling off their collections of PC Sims 2 games cheaply on eBay, and now that I have a Mac that runs Bootcamp and can get Windoze free from work, I'm thinking about going over to the Dark Side just so I can play with witches and all the goodies you PC players have had for years (to say nothing of Sim PE, etc. )

I'm not done playing with this toy yet.

You can see this in Shakespeare's plays, where there are characters who aren't supposed to be English speakers.  The most famous is probably the bilingual "love" scene at the end of *Henry V*, where the French princess Katherine blows off a compliment with "O Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleins de tromperies." Henry asks her lady in waiting,  "What does she say?  That men's tongues are full of deceit?" and Alice responds, "Oui, dat de tongues of de mans is be full of deceits. . . dat is de princess."  It's an almost word for word rendering of French into English.

There's another character in *Love's Labors Lost* who is a Spanish traveller.  Often the character is acted with a thick, almost indecipherable Spanish accent, but that doesn't fit the way he actually speaks, which is extremely fancy and formal, with at least three alternative words employed for the same thing.  The guy adores language, and he can't resist showing it off:  "see!  See!  LOOK how fabulous my English is!"  (Just ignore the fact that the play is supposedly set in France for now--everybody speaks English.)  Plus the stereotype of what Spaniards are like was different:  it wasn't all castanets and Carmen and ole; it was more Phillip the II, formal and stuffy with very starched clothes.  So his speech is hypercorrect.  Or Shaw's Professor Higgins is right:  foreigners speak English beautifully.  It's native English speakers who crucify the language.