Toys and Games – Bogwarrior.com

This is the most popular post on the site, so I thought I would rewrite it and bring it up to date. I’ve also made a video of it, just in case you’re not into reading walls of text.

Update: EA has re-released The Sims and The Sims 2, both tweaked to work on modern computers. If you don’t feel like faffing around with all this, you can get them here https://www.ea.com/games/the-sims/the-sims-25th-anniv-edition

If you’re interested in downloading and playing The Sims Complete Collection, which comprises the original game and the seven expansion packs, it can be downloaded from Archive.org. It’s a download of over 2 GB and takes a while, but it works fine.

Screenshot from The Sims (2000) — If this screen capture was taken in 2020 you could say she was about to have a Zoom meeting

If you’d rather stick with the original game, then read on.

A copy of the game and a modified version of sims.exe can be downloaded from here. Download at your own risk. If you have any technical questions, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I’m just the messenger…

If you own a copy of the original game, please use that instead. The only thing you will need is the modified sims.exe file for the final step. That can be downloaded from here

And finally…

Unzip the Sims zip file into a folder on your computer. If you own the original game on CD, copy everything into a folder on your computer.

Right-click on Setup.exe and select Run as Administrator

Install the game.

Once the game installs, navigate to C: Program Files (x86)\Maxis\The Sims
(on older 32-bit computers the game installs into C: Program Files\Maxis\The Sims)

Rename the original sims.exe file to sims(old).exe. This is because we’re about to over-write it with a newer, modified version that’ll enable the game to run on a modern PC with no CD drive

Open a new Windows Explorer window and navigate to where you’ve either downloaded the entire game (look in the Crack folder) or the smaller modified sims.exe file. What you will be doing now is copying sims.exe into C: Program Files (x86)\Maxis\The Sims

With this done, there are only a couple more steps to take. The first one is to copy a shortcut to the computer’s desktop

In Windows 10, it’s simply a matter of right-clicking on Sims.exe and picking Send to/Desktop (create shortcut). In Windows 11, select Show More Options, then Send to Desktop (create shortcut)

Once you’re back on the desktop, right-click on the Sims shortcut you’ve just created and select Properties from the menu

Go to the Compatibility tab and choose an older operating system. Now you’re good to go.

If you find that the version of Windows you’ve chosen doesn’t work, try another.

If you played the original game, you may have used programs such as Sims Art Studio and Sims Homecrafter. None of these are working for me and I’m not going to chase those up to see if they can be made work again. The good news is that there are still lots and lots of custom-made Sims goodies (floors, walls, skins, objects) freely available online.

If the advice here doesn’t work, try the advice given on this site

As we all know, gaelic football and ~~hockey crossed with murder~~ hurling are exciting sports which are enjoyed by very many people in Ireland. So how better to convey the speed and the thrills of our native sports than to er….replicate it as a board game?

Páirc (pronounced as “pawrk”) was a board game which came out in 1985. The mutant offspring of Subbuteo (figurines!) and Monopoly (dice, cards!), the lid of the box proclaimed that it was “A thrilling Gaelic board game”. So needless to say, a game which promised so much was bound to be delivered by Santa Claus that Christmas 😈

What’s in the box?

A board
A green dice
A white dice
A dice holder
2 teams of 15 hurlers
2 teams of 15 footballers
32 “Referee cards”
32 “Break of the ball” cards
A set of score sheets
A small ball for hurling
A large ball for football
30 player bases
A set of rules
2 sets of goal posts

Most of these survived in our game, apart from the dice holder, the small ball for hurling and the goalposts. So for the photos, I embraced my inner 10-year-old and improvised using a skewer, glue and some blu-tack 😉

After the excitement of opening the box, things inevitably started to ground to a halt 😦 For it turned out that Páirc was long on rules and short on action. Let’s face it, it’s going to get slow when you open the box and are faced with two stacks of cards (the Referee Cards and the Break of the Ball ones serve the same purpose as the Chance? and Community Chest ones in Monopoly), dice and instructions that run to 6 pages… It’s all too boring to describe really – if you’re a glutton for punishment you can have a look at the rules here (7mb pdf file)

It also was a game that took forever to set up. Instead of having little players ready to go out of the box like you would with Subbuteo, the players in this game came in the form of cardboard cut-outs which sat into plastic bases. And as we all know, cardboard isn’t a medium that stands up well to repeated poking and prodding. So it’s no great surprise that even though we didn’t really play the game that often, many of the game figures are grubby and the worse for wear.

pairc footballers — It’s Ulster vs Connaught in the football

Also in the box was a scoresheet from when we played the game. They’re very low-scoring games and perhaps that’s the most criminal thing of all. One of the unique selling points of Gaelic games is the scores. Not something that was ever going to happen in Páirc unless you’re the sort of person who enjoys jogging through treacle.

Click on an image below to launch the gallery