Sunday 16 June 2002

Pic of the day: Title screen from The Sims on Holiday. Redefining family values, says the small text in Norwegian. But not all holidays are created equal ...

"How hard can it be?"

And no, this is an utterly family-friendly entry. It all started with The Sims. OK, it started with Morrowind, which I decided to not play for a while because of my hand. Whenever I do the same thing for a long time, that's bad for the hand. Too much typing, too much Morrowind, too much Sims. But a little of each is OK. I also had a long walk, and meals, lots of small meals actually, Anyway, The Sims. I picked up The Sims on Holiday (I think it is called "Vacation" in the USA, this is the Nordic version, which is usually in British English. Long story.)

This add-on pack was released in Norway on May 31, and the first to feature Norwegian text throughout the game. Swedish and Finnish text had been available since the start, I think, certainly Swedish. But I have played in English. As old readers know, I think half the time in English and half in New Norwegian, switching seamlessly from one to another depending on context. Swedish is like a dialect of Norwegian, but I still prefer English. After all, I use English. I have no need of Swedish neither at work nor at home. But just for amusement, I decided to install The Sims on Holiday with Norwegian text. The Sims themselves of course continue to talk gibberish, so it's only the names of objects and the system messages that will change. And how hard can it be to install in another language?

The box said that "after installing, The Sims on Holiday will allow you to play all your installed Sims games in Norwegian. For more information see the manual". I installed it, using English during the installation as usual. After installing, I looked in vain for information in the manual. And in the help files. And on the Net. (Though some good came of it ... I found a Sims Fan site in New Norwegian, and discovered that it was by Siri Fransson. She probably doesn't remember me, but I remember her from the dawn of the Net here in Norway, the age where we were all migrating from the BSS world. It was a pleasant surprise to see that she was still active. Some people are just hard to shake off. According to the doctors she should have died as a child. Then again, so should I. God is hard to out-guess. Siri's online company is IrisData.

***

Anyway, I found no info about Norwegian text anywhere, and so I decided to install it all from the start on the new portable, using Swedish on the earlier installations and Norwegian on Holiday. This took its sweet time, what with typing in the serial numbers from the back of the covers and later manuals of each add-on. Then when I was about to start it, I remembered all the cool skins I had downloaded – mostly super heroes and Harry Potter characters, but still cool, especially when the townies mix and match them. Ahem. Well, I would just copy them over. How hard could it be?

I quickly and effortlessly copied the whole Skins folder to my zip disk. Then I unplugged the relevant USB port from the hub on my desktop machine, and plugged it into my portable. It's USB, the machine will recognize the hardware on the fly. No reboot necessary. And with a mass market product such as this, no install disks necessary – Windows keeps drivers for everyday units on the hard disk all the time. So there was a delay of a couple seconds, and Windows XP proudly declared that it had identified USB "human interface". Now that seemed an exaggeration. Iomega delivers cheap storage media (for every value of cheap) but there is nothing particularly human about those, nor do they qualify as interface in any usual sense of the word. And more troubling, no new drive letter showed up under "my computer".

I spent a long time in the control panel, disabling and enabling stuff, asking the computer to look for new hardware, and inserting an ancient floppy and then a CD with the software for Windows 95. Of course these were promptly rejected – this software does not support Windows NT. Eventually I had to put the Portable online and download the Iomegaware software from Iomega.com. It is still downloading as I write this.

In the meantime I have transferred the entire content of my Skins folder by floppy. It continued for a long time after I lost count of my disk jockeying. Select ca 1 MB of files, cut, select floppy, paste, when finished put floppy in portable, select all, cut, select Skins folder, paste, repeat ad nauseam. There were quite a few megabytes there after all, I guess. It would probably have been faster to just FTP it to my web site and back to the portable ... but then again, the portable was already downloading other stuff, remember?

Well, the skin copying is finished now. So is the day. It is approaching midnight, my wrist hurts, and I've still not started to play The Sims ...