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Pokemon GBA Bugs Out, Internal Clock To Blame

Posted by simoniker on from the time-travel-testing dept.

Thanks to 1UP for their article revealing the popular GameBoy Advance titles Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire have a time-unlocked glitch that's just been activated in Japan, since the game has features based on how long it's been played, and Nintendo have discovered there's "...an issue with its internal clock that can disable certain gameplay systems after a year's worth of playtime." Specifically, you can plant trees in-game which "eventually bear fruit, which you then feed to your pet monsters to cause them to evolve in useful and interesting ways." Unfortunately, after a year from the game's start date, "those trees are unable to grow." Nintendo has "...invited Japanese players to bring or send their game cartridges to one of many service centers around the country. The service centers will apply a patch that corrects the issue and return the fixed copy of the game free of charge." Finally, Nintendo of America have commented "The earliest the issue could appear [in the U.S.] is March 2004, which is the one year anniversary of the first sale in North America."

1 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Here we go by unclethursday · · Score: 4, Informative
    because there is NO SUCH thing for the Xbox. Downloadable content only adds to the experience, it doesn't fix it if it's broken. Otherwise we'd have seen a patch for KOTOR months ago, since it is LIVE enabled.

    Please see Unreal Championship, Capcom Vs. SNK 2 EO, NFL 2K3, Crimsons Skies, and a host of other Live games that have been patched. UC and CvSNK were the only two games that were publically announced as having patches (tarnishing MS' promise of no patches on XBL); but Microsoft does mandate that all XBL games have the ability to be patched.

    Instead of announcing a patch, publically, what will happen when you try to connect to XBL when a patch is available is that you will get is a screen that says "Xbox Live has an update available, you will not be able to connect to Xbox Live until this update is installed." Yet, if you pop in another XBL game, you can connect fine. That's how they're hiding the patches now.

    XBL has patches. You just didn't realize you were seeing them.