Sims 2 started crashing after 2/6 patch

I purchased the game on the EA App on 2/4 and have been playing it with relatively few issues (I had to turn the shadows down to medium in order for the game to run, and I've had the occasional unrelated crash). However, since the new patch downloaded earlier today, the game has crashed whenever I tried to load into a family or create a sim. I'm so disappointed because it was working completely fine before this. The error message just says: "The application has crashed. The application will now terminate."