S4 Game won't load after update

Going to general forum is like looking for a needle in a haystack in another country.  There is no sticky there.  It is 12-28-14 and my game now gets stuck on the page where you choose new game or play ect.  I saw no suggestions there as people who didn't have an issue have moved on.  I tried some suggestions, but my game didn't improve.  EA forced these updates and they should clean up after them.  Never heard of a game where people who are not computer savy were forced to try to mess with files or be forced to face the fact that they have blown money for an item they can't use.  There are several with these problems and it needs to be looked into, because we can't play our games.

 I did also try to remove tray ect. and that did allow some access, but not to the saved sims ect. Thanks.

This is I didn't play for days before loading the new update and Christmas freebies, so there was no files for me like that.

This is in reply to taking out files for the playing tray for that day.

The only real working answer in the Technical forums is to delete the game and start over.  That will really suck if you have to do that with all new gamepacks, Eps, and updates.  Not sure I would stick around.

Update:  I decided to sign in to my origin account and then go to the top left and click play offline and it let me right in, so being online was the problem for me.  Does EA/origin/maxis know that there is a tray problem for some and that this forces players to play offline?  One of the people trying to help me lutherinrising says that she doesn't know if they are aware of this problem or not.  I have 6 kids and limited time, so I don't FB and twitter and can't find this out myself.  I know that you keep in touch with them to some degree and didn't know if you know or not or plan to ask them.  I did recieve the message from windows that it couldn't open that screen saver about 3 diff times and wasn't sure if some screen after the diamond wasn't loading right for some or what.