After my Sims 2 post a couple of days ago, I’ve started getting some emails from other Sims fans and stuff. It’s been rather fun, blogging about something new for a change. So when I encountered a little problem with my game and ended up spending about two hours trying to figure it out, I figured I might want to share the solution with everyone else, because apparently I stumbled across a rather common problem.

    Here’s what was happening: when I got the Apartment Life expansion pack, I played the game a few times just fine without any problems. Then one day the game just up and decided not to load for me anymore. I’d get to the main launch screen, hit “play”, then the game just flat out wouldn’t load. The little hourglass would keep turning, I could hear the CD rev up, then after a few seconds… nothing.

    Of course I contacted EA Technical Support. They made a few suggestions, the only one of which that worked was to create an entirely new user account in Windows, which takes up a ton of hard drive space and is generally just a pain in the butt. That meant I had to transfer all my downloaded items, my saved games, all of it, over to the new user’s documents folder. That sucked and again took up loads of hard drive space. But worst of all, it worked for a while, but then that one crapped out too! After I installed the new Mansion & Garden expansion pack – which I was so thrilled about, thinking they’d have fixed the problem by then – the game worked all of one time before it crapped out on both user accounts!

    That happened last night and holy crap was I frustrated! I only had a little bit of time to play before I had to go to sleep and all that time was wasted trying to get it to work. But you know what? Even though EA Technical Support failed me, the Sims fans came through! I did quite a bit of googling before finding a solution thanks to Numenor over at Mod The Sims. It was buried in a forum, though, so I thought I would reprint Numenor’s selection here so that hopefully other Sims fans might be able to find it faster on google.

    So what do you do if your Sims 2 game won’t load after you hit “play” on the launch screen?

    Rather than creating more and more user accounts on Windows, try this first to see if it will work.

    1 – Open up windows explorer and go to My DocumentsEA GamesThe Sims 2.

    2 – In that main Sims 2 folder, look for these two files: “Accessory.cache” and “Groups.cache”. Move those two files over to your main “My Documents” folder, so that they’re saved there but removed from The Sims 2 folder.

    3 – Now try loading the game!

    If you’re having the same problem that I was having, that should solve it! And don’t worry, it won’t hurt your game – those files are generated each time you load your game, so you aren’t hurting anything. The only thing is, those files can easily become corrupted, so each time you want to play, just delete those two files and load your game again. It’s that simple! Isn’t that much, much, much easier than constantly creating new user accounts? I was so excited when I found out about this that I totally wanted to do a happy dance! But since I can’t really do that right now, I made my Sims do a happy dance for me. 🙂

    Hope this helps! Happy Simming, everybody!