Benie's General Blog

The release of The Sims 3 has long passed us. I’ve seen a few pictures of it. And the first thing I said was “This looks like TS2!”.
Constantly I put my foot down to get this game. It’s been awhile since I’ve talked about buying a game instead of buying a video card.

Well. This was until I saw this thread on Facepunch of people posting their pics. I decided to take a look. First thing I noticed was you can now freely rotate furniture, just like you can do in RL. So that’s cool. The graphics haven’t improved, but the features have. I even stopped on a picture of seeing in a corner… a car. Do we have drivable cars now… without getting a shitload of EP’s? Apparently so.

Sims also have received a facelift. They look more.. human now. Fat guys look more fat now, and it looks like the CAS(Create-A-Sim) system has improved too.

What’s stopping me from buying it? Three things. Lock up issue. Money, and…. one other thing. A thing I keep forgetting after saying “Wow”. It’s… the past. My past sim life. Do I really wanna recreate my house like I did in the past, just play with it for awhile, and then be bored in a half an hour and question why did I buy it, when all I did in TS2… was live on my own? Treated TS2 like a modified 3D version of a House Creator?

I used to enjoy tearing down and rebuilding, over and over, because I was never happy with the design. And now… I’m all “meh”. You see in the past with The Sims 1, and in TSO, I.. well. I have a confession to make….
Back then was when I was sooo obsessed with TAB, and created Norb and Dag as sims, and even the dam to the best of my abilities. I also made myself to live with them.
Had so much fun trying to re-enact episodes of TAB using it. And that time where I gave Dag a love potion by accident, and he fell inlove with a sim, and I thought I would have to move him out, and it would pretty much ruin everything.
Those where some good times. Me and Norb where such good friends. I could always count on him to make me feel better. But I cannot recreate those touching memories now. TAB has been dead for a long time, and my obsession for that show attempts to live on.

All attempts to bring it back end up in failure. When I first heard of TS2, I thought that I would be able to create my house, then Norb and Dag’s house, and look out the window and yell “Hey, neighbor!”.
I wonder if this is possible in TS3, to walk beyond your lot boundary.. without going to the ‘Where do you want to go?’ screen. If it is, I will so get this game.

I honestly don’t know much about it. But I’m slowly starting to learn. However, I got more important things to take care of before I start buying games again.

If I do decide to get this, I’m going to have to make a decision. Video Card… or this game? I cannot afford both this month. In my opinion, and what my common sense is telling me, go for a video card.
But something is telling me.. “Ben. You’ll never get this thing fixed. You’re wasting too much money to fix it already, and you still don’t truly know what’s causing it. Just get the game.”

I tried this new thing called “Google Gadgets”, similar to “Yahoo! Widgets”. Basically little addons you can place on your Desktop.
I got this standard stopwatch thingy. I want a Desktop Stopwatch that I can activate the second I run a game, just to truly see how long it takes to lock up. The stopwatch would freeze up the exact second the lock up issue strikes, giving me the exact time.
I’m also writing down these lock up times using Visual Page, to give me an idea of what the lock up issue is doing.

Anyway, the other reason I posted this entry is because I made another surprising discovery. I played Super Mario 64, and it locked up within the first 33 minutes and 31 seconds of first turning it on.
Played Calamity, and it locked up again at exactly 1 minute and 50 seconds.

Calamity, and any game that has a main menu can’t be counted right. What I mean is, in order to get an accurate reading of how long it takes, as soon as I click to launch the game, I got my stopwatch, and I have to wait for the splash screens to pass, then load, then the main menu.
The time it takes to hit New Game or Load Game is also added to the time it takes to lock up, which gives an inaccurate reading.
So, why not just start the stopwatch the second I start a new game? This is tricky, and even harder when I have force-fullscreen games like Crysis and Fallout 3, and even harder in Crysis Warhead with it’s constant vehicle battles, and me having to toggle v_goliathmode on and off constantly out of game to keep from failing.

Anyway, I wanted to see if the main menu would lock up if I just let it sit there for as long as it took for SM64 to lock up. It surpassed this. So I resetted my stopwatch, and hit the New Game button and restarted my stopwatch.
When I hit 1 minute and 50 seconds mark.. no lock up. Played longer… and longer… it surpassed SM64’s lock up mark, all the way through beating the fucking game, with NO lock ups!!
It took 1 hour, 7 minutes, and 27 seconds to beat it from start to finish. Of course I had god mode on.
But what’s more important — NO LOCK UP!!!!!! Nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip! .. Wtf?

Am I thinking what I think I’m thinking? Is my lock up issue… dieing? Is it struggling to stay alive, but failed to piss me off in Calamity? (shakes his head) I’m not convinced it’s dead. If it was truly dead, then ALL of my games, nomatter how long I play them, would be lock up free.
It’s just as I feared though. Something that was on my hard drive is contributing to the lock up issue. Trouble is, finding it. I got thousands, if not tens of thousands of files and folders. Any one of them could be the culprit. And there also could be more than one file causing it. Multiple files… folders…games could be causing it.
It’s pretty much looking for a non-sharp needle in a haystack the size of an 18 wheeler.

I’m still planning to get a video card. But for the software-level issue, the only thing I can do is just reinstall one game at a time, see which one starts fucking up the others, and I’ll have my culprit.