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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."
Nonsense. This is exactly the type of bug the QA team should be looking for. It IS possible for them to adjust the time to their whim because they (both the developer and test team) would be doing early testing on an emulator. A debug tool would be provided to allow them to change many features of the game, instantly give items, basically anything a game shark type device can do, and more.
Does the whole of the slashdot crowd here actually believe they didn't know about this bug? This is quite an obvious thing to test. They must have tried advancing the year at least once.
This is a major failure. Either their development and test teams are ENTIRELY incompetent or they knowingly released the game with this bug. Which do you believe?
P.S. Any feature ceasing to function entirely should be a showstopper.