http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31797
--- Comment #3 from Henri Verbeet hverbeet@gmail.com 2012-09-26 05:31:51 CDT --- (In reply to comment #2)
Created attachment 41838 [details] Logs for starting Sims3Launcher.exe and starting TS3.exe (clean prefix)
Newer versions of Wine will give better error messages for this, but it sounds a bit like you don't have s3tc support. Do you have libtxc_dxtn installed? Alternatively, you could try if setting force_s3tc_enable=true as environment variable makes it any better.