Wednesday, September 3, 2008

first ep i bought in ages, and i have major rants

So with much internal buzz, courtesy of my internal cerebral monologue system, and excitement, I bought The Sims 2 Apartment Life Expansion Pack (from henceforth abbreviated as AL)... and perhaps made the first wrong move of buying it only one week after a release.

You see, unlike most other games on the market, EA is incredibly SLOW (read: bold, italic, capitalise, 'slow') in releasing patches and bug fixes. It's horrible. Based on previous experiences and what other information I gathered at the official site's BBS and forums like Mod The Sims 2 (MTS2) and More Awesome Than You! (MATY), EA simply loves to release half-assed versions of the game with skins and meshes of poor taste and quality (so I hardly use them), awesome, cool, but constantly glitched gameplay, stupid object overrides and other major bork-ups discussed in this MATY thread. Then weeks or months later, after they put up a thread on the official site's BBS for people to discuss about the glitches, bugs, overrides and screw-ups in their game which they promptly don't moderate or even look at, they finally release a patch that probably only fixes a quarter of all the problems mentioned by that small percentage of all players who have internet access and lurk the boards. In between and after, modders and hackers release hacks, mods and fixes that do a much cleaner job for free than the game engineers at EA who get paid to do it. Horrible.

A few minutes into the game, I've created a blank neighbourhood, and I'm currently in Create-A-Sim (CAS). I expected poor taste in designing clothes, and true enough, one third of it looks terrible. Of the remaining two-thirds that look decent, half of them are converted meshes and recolors of skins from older EPs, all of which have already been done by the likes of cloudlessnights and migamoo on MTS2. How fashionably late, EA. Being a fan of cloudlessnights and migamoo's creations and mesh conversions I'm rather pissed off with EA for plagiarising their own users. Users infringing the rights of the game creators is one thing; the reverse is quite another! Hmmph!

And the hair meshes. Oh. My. Motherfucking. Fathersodomising. Buddha-jumping-over-the-wall. GOD. Odd meshes. Fugly artificial textures. FIVE SEPARATE HAIR FILES OF THE SAME BLOODY MESH AND THE ONLY DIFFERRENCE? The colour of the hairpin or the hairband. HOW IRRELEVANT. And as usual they don't ever have the decency and initiative to convert meshes for Teens, Children and Toddlers before the fine folk at fansites get to it.

Five minutes into the game. Not. Enjoying. Much.

Hopefully the gameplay will change my perceptions.

I didn't purposely subject myself to this sort of agony and cautiousness when I bought the game a few hours ago. I was looking forward to it.

And now I feel awful playing without any sort of up-to-date patch or bug fixes. Needless to say I feel awful playing without hacks and mods because nearly all of them aren't updated yet to work with AL. Now I sort of regret buying the game so soon. The agony of waiting for the patch!!