The Sims 3 won't start after 1.67 update

Hi there,
 I bought The Sims 3 ages ago together with the World Adventures Expansion Pack. After a couple of years, I stopped playing and only recently have I decided to re-install the game on my pc (windows 8).  
However, the game required several updates in order to start. I updated it through the launcher up to 1.67. It took about five hours but in the end there seemed to be no more patches available.

I tried to start the game, but after clicking on the “play” button, the screen turned black and a message popped up saying that the game could not be started [Unable to start game Service initialization failed (0x039e8474)].
I tried restarting the computer but it made no difference whatsoever.  
So I downloaded the super-patch just to be sure I’d not forgotten something but it says it’s not needed.
I removed missingdeps.idx for someone had said the issue may reside there, but the game still won’t start. I tried to run it as administrator but nothing changed.
I also get a message whenever I try to launch the game that says “an error has occurred in the script of this page Line:104 Char:3 Error: expected identifier string or number Code: 0  URL: http://launcher.thesims3.com/launcher/home.html launcherLocale=en_US&launcherCountry=IE&var=loggedOut”.
I don’t know if the two things are related, I am really no computer whiz.  
Do you have any ideas on how to fix the problem? I am willing to delete and re-install the game, but without the updates it won’t allow me to download Riverview or any other store content and even though it isn't actually fundamental to my gameplay, I’d like to make full use of The Sims.
Thank you in advance and sorry for such a lengthy question!