I don't have TS3.  Internetz are expensive here.  Also, I have big plans for my Sims2 game.  There are so many aspects of gameplay that I haven't dipped into yet, such as fulfilling the 5 top-level businesses want and running a boarding school with Inge's mods.  The screen shots of TS3 look very nice, in terms of lighting and shadows and so forth, and I think if I tried it out I'd get spoilt and TS2 would look crappy by comparison.  And then I wouldn't want to play either game, since one would be crappy to look at and the other would be crappy to play.

The discussion about "a water" reminds me of Arthur Ransome's use of the phrase "a sea" in his book "We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea" (1937):

"A sea broke over her bows, and sheets of water flew up over the cabin roof, into the mainsail, and splashed down over the struggling figures in the cockpit."

I think Liz's reasoning applies here, so it's another example of the same thing.

It's not just your game.  Using the phone, I can get a Sim to invite another over from a neighbouring apartment, and they express the usual enthusiasm but don't show up.

Thanks for the replies.  Zazazu, that's really interesting, it didn't occur to me at the time to see if securom was the problem - I probably had the version that came with Seasons.  I last tried to install SC4 shortly after SP3 was released, maybe 9 months to a year ago.  I was trying to install from the original CD and the computer wouldn't run the disk, though the CD drive was fine.

A friend of ours still had service pack 2 but was about to install SP3, so I tried installing SC4 onto his computer before and after.  It worked fine before SP3 was installed, but afterward the result on his computer was the same as on mine - no recognition of the disk at all.

I drew the conclusion that SC4 was too old for SP3, but obviously I was wrong.  Good to know.

For those of you still playing Sim City 4, are you using Service Pack 3?

Thanks