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I getting slightly interested in buying the Mansions and Gardens stuffpack but before I do this I want to known if there is any known problems whit it. My game is working OK right now and it would be a disaster if a bad stuffpack would do any damage or anything in paticular. Maybe it's just me overreacting but the question is free is'nt it? I think so anyway.

It needn't be a disaster to change your mind. Back up your neighborhoods before installing the SP, and if you don't like it, you can uninstall and put your backup in.

Things I noticed when I added M&G were that my sims were much more prone to ACR-like behavior, autonomous flirting and so on; the infamous "salute the sun" gesture, and smelling flowers. As in, getting down on their hands and knees and sticking their faces into it.

Apart from the game engine and a few gestures like that, it's mostly build/buy mode stuff - after all, it's a stuff pack - so there wasn't that much there that was breakable.

What Peni said about backing it up and trying it out.

Otherwise: It's the same game engine as Apartment Life. If you already have AL and everything is working right, then M&G isn't going to break your game or even change it significantly because it doesn't change anything about the way the game runs. Now, if you DON'T already have AL and you use hacks/mods, you will need to update them to the Apartment Life version of them. Or, if they haven't been updated, some of them might not work anymore. But some still will. It depends on the mod. I had to do this because I got M&G before I got AL. It was a pain, but not a HUGE pain.

That said, the pack adds some objects and some actions (like the eye-shading and the flower-smelling) which you may or may not like. That's all personal preference, and if you find you don't like them I'm pretty sure that someone's created a hack to get rid of them. Me, I love the functional ceiling fans and the functional solar panels; those alone made the pack a "Yes, gimme!" in my book. (Most of the others, although I have them, I could live without them.)

Well, it seems to me that I have to try it. I do not have the AL extension but I do have some hacks: Casual romance, No more mrs Crumplebottom and the Collage adjuster (to set the kids grades up if they can not do it thereself) but as long as they work it's fine. Updating those hacks would be hard as I use a strict "off line policy" for my game computer. That to prevent it from being infected by virus and other bad stuff. This Win Vista coumputer have been offline for so long the antivirus scan software have been outdated. I'm sorry to say it but, its the way it is. The main reason to keep it offline is my fear of my Sims game being damaged.

I don't know about the others you mentioned because I don't use them, but if by "Casual romance" you mean Autonomous Casual Romance (ACR), you will definitely need to update that one or else things will be screwy.

The desktop machine I use to play the game at home is offline not because I fear for my game but simply because it's the only desktop in the house and the internet is all wireless and I can't be bothered to run an Ethernet cable to the desktop because it's on the other side of the house from the modem. So I just download stuff on another machine and use a flash drive to put the files on the desktop. It's kind of a pain, but IMO not as much of a pain as running cable or getting and installing a wireless card on the desktop.

There are some known bugs when you try to run M&G without AL. It's really best to have AL before you install M&G.

This is true. That said, the only ones that I noticed were:

1) While the bookshelves had the options to learn the new skills introduced in AL (Fire Safety, Couples Counseling, etc.), those things didn't actually work unless the Sim took out a book, put it down without putting it back in the bookcase, and then you clicked the individual book (not the bookcase) and had the Sim study the skill.

2) The "Huggle" interaction between two toddlers. While it showed on the pie menu if you clicked on another toddler while you had a toddler active, the interaction never happened if you chose it. It just fell out of the active toddler's queue. I'm assuming this is because the interaction is in the AL code, not M&G's.

Other than those, I didn't personally notice anything buggy, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Still, I had nothing game-breaking. Most of the "bugginess" I experienced was when I was still working on updating hacks and weeding out ones that weren't updated to AL and that didn't work anymore. Since I had (and have) hundreds of hacks/fixes in my game, that was quite the project! On the other hand, since I did have so many hacks and many of them were generating "bugs," I might not have noticed any more actual M&G bugs. And I got AL soon after, so I didn't play for long with M&G but not AL installed.

M&G is a marvelous stuff pack-but it's not really a stuff pack like any of the others because it does change the game engine and acts like an EP. When I look in Clean Installer it says my game engine is M&G not AL. But you don't want it before AL as they go together and you will get some bugs if you don't have AL already on, plus some of your mods may stop working if you have M&G and not AL. If you only have money for one, get AL first.

If you do get AL, don't forget to get Pescado's "alfixes". It fixes a LOT of bugs (more than the description says), as well as fixing bugs that were fixed in the AL patch, but re-broken in M&G (Wow EAxis ). Get both the AL Patch and alfixes, and happy Simming.

If you have M&G without AL, some of the animations break. The worst is the "morning cuddles," my favorite animation of all time, when sim couples waking up together will spend a little time snuggling in bed before getting up - without AL, the cuddles happen, but the couples often get stuck and get out!

I haven't had morning cuddles for awhile now. I think I have some mod stopping them but I don't know what. *is sad*

Better hunt for and discard it. Somebody (Pescado? It's the kind of charming, uncontrollable, inessential thing he finds annoying) made a mod specifically to suppress that behavior, so maybe you put it in while you still had M&G only?

And it is just so freaking adorable, especially when they start stroking eachother's hair!

M&G broke something small that has to do with placing (modular) stairs next to walls. You have to have moveobjects on to place those stairs next to walls. Other than that, its really a great stuff pack, the cherry on top!

I don't know if Pescado made a mod to stop morning cuddles, but I do use a mod by Squinge to stop morning cuddles. It annoyed me that Sims kept almost missing the carpool because they took forever and a day to get out of the cuddle.

It is the kind of thing he would mod out, in fact a lot of things he mods out I keep in. Annoying babies? Not to me. Bathroom mods? I tried one and had sims looping between using the toilet and the bath it was crazy!

Thing is I got every EP and sp pretty much as it came out, so AL would have gone on first. I know I had the cuddle and then one day I noticed that I didn't.

Orilon, I'll have to look. I do have a number of Squinge's mods. What is that one called?

Squinge's mod is called "No Cuddle Under Sheets".

So that's why I couldn't place those modular stairs! I never figured out what was the problem, and I use 'moveobjects' a lot, so it didn't bother me that much. Although, now that I know that M&G was the culprit, I really do wonder what EAxis was thinking when they were making "The very last stuff pack for The Sims 2! Should we do our best job?". Probably not...

Thanks Orilon, but it said 'no items match your search' so either it's not that or if I do have it, the file name is called something else. Hmm. I'm not going to do a 50/50 yet, although at some point I will as my maternity separates are broken as well.

Its called "NoCuddleUnderSheets.package" http://www.insimenator.org/index.ph...c,102009.0.html

No, nothing came up saying I had that either marka. Even trying just cuddle by itself only brings up squinges cuddle with breast feeding mod, some plant and a shower curtain. I think it's one of those mysteries.

I don't have either pack, but according to freefalldreams, if you have M&G without AL, you lose your University espresso bars. (It's in her signature.)

I should also point out that none of Pescado's mods are supported for M&G without AL. When something goes wrong with one of the MATY mods, Pescado will tell you to install AL or uninstall M&G. I know because I found problems with some of his mods with that configuration. No, sorry, I can't remember the problems that I had.

Offtopic: has somebody a link to a video or pic of morning cuddles? Would like to know what that looks like. And all I find is either Sims3 or the normal cuddle on the couch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmaGO5lJndI

The top spoon (either the person who got into the bed first, or in a post-woohoo situation the one who did not initiate) rolls over on his or her back and pulls the bottom spoon across his or her chest and they just like there like this awhile, sometimes top spoon stroking bottom spoon's hair and bottom spoon making little sleepy murmurs, often looking up/down at each other.