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."

Comments

I hope...

[quandrum]

this problem doesn't appear in March. To play a single game for a substantial portion of a day everday for a year is... yikes.

How many people can his possibly affect? How much can you do in a video game in a 8,544 hours? It boggles the mind.

Re:I hope...

[Guppy06]

"To play a single game for a substantial portion of a day everday for a year is... yikes."

Um... the internal clock is there so you don't have to play the game every day of the year for the game to know it's been a year since you first set the clock.

Interesting insight to the cartrridge...

[stienman]

Sounds like the cartridge might be flashable, then? If so, it's a cheap way to get a flash cartridge, if we can figure out how to program it.

Is the real time clock in the cartridge itself? It must be if you can use the game on one gameboy, then resume gameplay on another gameboy. Could make for some interesting hacks.

-Adam

Nintendo has always had excellent tech support

[dancingmad]

Of course I'm talking about NOA, but every experience I've had with them has led me to believe that the NOA tech people really put the customer first. They'll chat with you about games, etc. and tell you whats up with bugs and things on the line. They even replaced a couple of N64 controllers for me (one with out me even having to send it back!)

My personal favorite console tech support thing is when Capcom's Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo for the SNES would freeze older SNES machines; they sent me a new model SNES and asked for the old to be shipped back to them, all free of charge for me. I did so and they sent a little token; coins featuring the SF2 characters. It's a cheap little thing, but I was a kid back than and really enjoyed it.

It's not the same thing, but PC publishers could learn a thing or two from the guys over on the console side.