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Pokemon GBA Bugs Out, Internal Clock To Blame
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."
Personally, I'm glad Nintendo of Japan is providing this service to their users. Maybe things like this will get fewer buggy console titles out the door if it becomes expected that you'll exchange them for working titles.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
sounds like a variable is used to store how much time has passed since the beginning of the game, after a while (a year in this case), the variable will reach its limit and things start to go wrong, something similar to Y2K bug.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Dude, you are missing the point. On PC or Xbox a lazy publisher can release an unfinished game, because you can release a patch with minor inconvenience.
This is going to be massively expensive for Nintendo. I expect they just copy the savegame to the latest version of the cartridge. As the game code is stored in a masked rom, there isn't much they can patch.
In their defense, it must be said that this is the sort of bug that's somewhat hard to predict... obviously the playtesters didn't have an entire year to test the game, or we'd only just now be getting it. And at least it isn't a show-stopper - only certain parts of the game stop working, not the whole thing.
--- Bwah?
Yeah, but that's what, the next generation of consoles there? I haven't been keeping up in the rumormill specs, but I'd be shocked silly if Sony wasn't planning on including some form of large storage in the PS3, and MS taking it out of the Xbox2 would be truly unique. I'm not sure whether or not Nintendo is planning on putting a drive in their next gen hardware (codename: Snarf), but I'm not entirely sure they count.
Buddha says, "Shut your karma hole."
This sounds like a fairly minor problem, one in which a small parrt of the game ceases to function coorrectly after the player has played the game for a *year!*. And Nintendo are going to absorb a massive cost to fix this!
There are many PC titles released this year which did not function correctly out of the box (including ETM, Halo, DE2, etc etc etc...). They have had varying levels of support which range from "deplorable" to "barely scraping through". Maybe some of these titles will be fixed over the next six months, maybe not. But one might argue that the cost of diistrivutting upadtes to PC consumers is far less than that to GBA players, so one might aargue patches to fix major, much less minor issues would be far more readily available.
If only the PC developers would a take a leaf out of Nintendos book.
Nintendo is most likely just copying the save data over to a new cartiage without the bug. You can't really rewrite write once ROMs. If GBA games could be rewritten why are people spending so much on flash cards when they can just buy a retail game?