I've been playing this game for nearly a year now with no issues.

One day, it randomly shut down on me while I was playing. Instead of the usual "debug excuse", it told me that the Sims encountered an error and was forced to shut down.

I reloaded the game and started a new family, but when I clicked the "play" arrow after choosing a house, the arrow went blank and no loading occurred. I restarted my computer and tried again, but this continued to happen.

So I uninstalled everything, reinstalled it back, and now whenever I click the Sims icon on my desktop, it tells me that there is an error and the game could not start. The launch screen won't even appear - it will try to load, the message interferes, and the game shuts back down.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled everything countless times, and the result has been consistent.

I have no mods, and everything I've downloaded has been from the Sim store. There's no precedent for this!

Has this happened to anyone else? I play on a Mac OSX, and as mentioned above, have had no issues with my Sim games. Can I contact EA? Does anyone have any advice?