Tag: Sims 3 on a Mac

The ongoing saga of Mac OS X Lion, The Sims 3 and EA’s inability to acknowledge a growing problem.

Published on by BluebellFlora85 Comments

3 days ago I started this thread over on the Mac Discussions forum as the first thread I started broke and an EA web person, if such a thing exists, did bugger all about it. It is now 20 pages long and is full of people complaining that they cannot play their game and pleading for help and acknowledgement from EA. To cut a long story short, it appears that Mac users who have installed OS X Lion and have either the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 or NVIDIA GeForce 320M CANNOT play The Sims 3 at all. It is impossible. The game loads fine, Create-a-Sim works fine, but as soon as they start playing the game it freezes within minutes.

Over 60 people have now posted their specs confirming that their game freezes. That’s 60 people who, apart from the frustration of not being able to play, are not buying content from the online Store and will probably not buy Town Life or any future EPs or SPs. You’re probably thinking that 60 isn’t very many right? Take into account that, at the time of writing, there are 1,174,271 registered users on the official TS3 site, the majority being Windows users. That’s a fraction of the amount of people who have bought the game but not bothered registering it. According to EA, the base game alone sold 1.4 million copies in it’s first week. That’s only the base game IN A WEEK. I’m willing to bet that there are thousands of other Mac users out there who are having this problem and just given up, and that number will rise as more people upgrade to Lion.

You can blame Apple, NVIDIA or EA. But it is in EA’s interests to sort this problem out, they are the only party suffering as the Mac users affected will simply stop buying the games and content and find other games to play.

That 20 page thread I mentioned earlier? Not a single Guru or Moderator has commented on it. I have received nearly 3,000 unique hits to Lion & TS3 related posts on this blog in 10 days. That is a huge amount for a little blog like this and the number is growing by the hour. Those hits are from all over the world with 90% of them coming from Macs.

EA have also now withdrawn official support for the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 card, as per the readme.txt that came with Town Life. If you have this card you’re supported up to Generations but that’s it (and the majority of people unable to play don’t have Town Life so technically they are supported). However it still says that the game requirements are Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher on the back of the DVD box, Lion being higher than Leopard (contrary to some EA Live Chat thingies saying that Lion isn’t supported).

Have a look at the thread:

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/413974.page

Users have been posting their transcripts from EA’s Live Chat and they make for very amusing, if not frustrating, reading. This is my personal favourite:

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/285/413974.page#5949011

So EA, grow some balls, stop pretending that this isn’t a growing problem, stop sending out contradictory statements via your own representatives, and start trying to remedy the situation, ok?

And this is the opening post on the thread:

OSX Lion & The Sims 3 – incompatible graphics cards

Published on by BluebellFlora19 Comments

Quick update to this ongoing problem. It’s looking like the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 and the NVIDIA GeForce 320M are the problem.

SimGuruHydra has commented on the thread over at TS3 letting us know they are aware of the problem (no comment…….).

In the meantime, if your Mac has one of these cards as the integrated card, and you have two graphics cards in the machine, try switching over to the dedicated card:

System Preferences > Energy Saver

Sorry to keep going on about this but I’m getting a lot of hits about it so hopefully people are aware of the specific problem and it will be resolved shortly.

The problem with OS X Lion and The Sims 3

Published on by BluebellFlora19 Comments

For my posts about OS X Lion and The Sims 3 see here, here and here. I think, and I’m no computer wiz, that the problem with the game freezing in Lion is a graphics card, specifically the Nvidia GeForce 9400 which is in Macs which are a couple of years old or so. One of the cards in my MacBoo Pro is the 9400. I switched over to it, started my game and it froze within minutes. I switched back over to the 9600 GT and it works fine again.

If you have a 15″ or 17″ MacBook Pro with the above graphics card go to System Preferences > Energy Saver and change your graphics to Higher Performance. Your Mac will switch to the Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT. You should now be able to play.

For all other Macs which have the graphics card, I’m sorry 😦 It’s up to Apple and EA to fix it. I suggest you contact Apple and flag it with them, they may release another update for the card. As for EA, they haven’t supported the graphics cards in Mac since 2009, why would they start now? The readme.txt file which comes with Town Life and Pets should be interesting if you’re a Mac user. The current one reads like this:

And the box states that the game will run on OS X Leopard 5.7 or higher. If EA don’t change this for Town Life and you can’t play your game, they have sold you a product which they are telling people won’t work. EA customer support are telling Mac users that TS3 will not run in Lion, to roll back to Snow Leopard. They’re wrong. Some of us Lion users are playing fine, we’re not using the Nvidia 9400 card. So if the text file still says that the Nvidia 9400 card is supported, it bloody shouldn’t be, at least not at the moment.

If you’re a Mac user running Lion and you can or cannot play TS3, please take a moment to post in this thread over on the official TS3 forums:

http://forum.thesims3.com/jforum/posts/list/413974.page

It will help us to work out any other issues which may be causing the game to freeze.