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Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Pokemon GBA Bugs Out, Internal Clock To Blame 83

Posted by simoniker 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."
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Pokemon GBA Bugs Out, Internal Clock To Blame More

Pokemon GBA Bugs Out, Internal Clock To Blame

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  • I guess this explains how console titles patch (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qzukk ( 229616 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @02:57PM (#7649290) Journal
    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.

    • Nintendo has always had excellent tech support (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dancingmad ( 128588 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @10:49PM (#7651671)
      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.

      • is when Capcom's Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo for the SNES would freeze older SNES machines

        I had a Super NES console from the first 3 months of the system's USA release. I also had a copy of Super Street Fighter II (no Turbo; Super Turbo never made it to the Super NES). No freeze.

        • There was a Super SF2 and a SF2 Turbo on SNES.

          Super SF2 included a "Turbo" mode and 4 new fighters like Cammy, the bruce lee rip off, T. Hawk, and that one jamaican kickboxer guy.

          Check it out. [gamestop.com]

          • Super SF2 included a "Turbo" mode

            True, Super SF2 included all twelve SF2 Turbo characters, the four new characters, and variable game speed, but it didn't include Akuma, the new boss of Super SF2 Turbo, nor any of its other new features. Capcom claimed that at the time Super SF2 was released, before the SDD-1 compression chip was invented, the 32 megabits of the largest available Super NES ROM weren't big enough to hold Super SF2 Turbo.

  • regaurding the bug (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dreadlord ( 671979 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @02:59PM (#7649301) Journal
    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.

  • Here we go (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Syncdata ( 596941 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @02:59PM (#7649302) Journal
    First X box live allows it, and now gameboy games are getting patched. I think it's great that Nintendo is going the extra mile for it's customers, but as soon as console game makers get the idea they can rely on patching, shipping games broken will be as prevelent as on the PC.
    Hooray. At that point, consoles get added to the list of vices i'll be able to cut out of my budget.

    • Re:Here we go (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:21PM (#7649467)
      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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:Here we go (Score:5, Informative)

          by unclethursday ( 664807 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @07:41PM (#7650890)
          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.

          • (Score: -1, Redundant)

            So what's getting patched, though - XBL content, or single player gamecode? I could probably excuse XBL content, as patching to update network issues or work around discovered client/server problems, etc, doesn't bug me too much. I can understand it, anyway. But SP stuff darn well ought to be correct out the door, yeah. I'm not trying to be confrontational - I don't actually know.

            • Re:Here we go (Score:2, Informative)

              by PainKilleR-CE ( 597083 )
              http://fasastudio.com/games/crimsonskies/Update+N e ws.htm

              One of the big issues we addressed was a problem with losing progress in the single player game if you adjusted settings in multiplayer. You should now feel free to adjust all the settings in multiplayer without worrying about affecting your single player game.

              Other fixes we've provided in the AutoUpdate include:
              Made Invert settings persistent for all controllers.
              Updated to the latest and greatest Xbox libraries (new and shiny is always good).
      • Have you never seen an IPS patch for a Gameboy or Gameboy Advance game? You can actually patch a lot to GB/A games; Metroid 2 for the GB was fan patched into a color DX version (or even a couple of them) and there are numerous translation patches for various Japan only games.

        • Re:Patching can do a lot (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Yes you can patch the ROM images; however, these are burned ROMs in the actual cartiage.

          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?

      • When it comes to updates, the worst of them is stuff like the PS2's DVD playing which has had several updates over time...but to get them, most often the best option is to buy a new version of it.

    • Re:Here we go (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Mighty Eris ( 729051 )
      I doubt that the practice of patching broken games will be that widespread. I imagine that this is going to cost Nintendo a significant amount of money, and that they're mainly just doing it for goodwill. Sure, X-Box live is already starting to cause some issues with that system, but I don't think it's going to become a console-wide problem until every system has a hard drive and internet access standard.

      • Re:Here we go (Score:2, Insightful)

        by KyolFrilander ( 730272 )
        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.

    • Re:Here we go (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Snowmit ( 704081 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @11:36AM (#7653642) Homepage
      First X box live allows it, and now gameboy games are getting patched. I think it's great that Nintendo is going the extra mile for it's customers, but as soon as console game makers get the idea they can rely on patching, shipping games broken will be as prevelent as on the PC.
      Hooray. At that point, consoles get added to the list of vices i'll be able to cut out of my budget.

      Every time someone talks about this bug or that bug on a console game it seems like people start complaining in the way that you are now complaining. "Oh no, patching will mean that formerly bug free console games will now have bugs. Why oh why are PC game makers so lazy? Blah blah blah."

      Bugs have been with us in consoles for a very long time. Remember Enter the Matrix? It's not alone. SSX Tricky has bluescreened my GameCube, people have already mentioned KOTOR and Crimson Skies, the list goes on.

      And it's not limited to modern games. Bugs have been around for ages, just we called them 'glitchs' and wrote them up in FAQs as cool things that people could explore. Here are a few, to refresh your memory:

      NES Metroid [gamespot.com]
      On most levels with the doors you shoot to cause them to open you can use a door to climb up many many walls/levels above. Simply shoot the door and stand with the front 1/2 of Samus wedged where the door will reform. After you are partially ''sealed'' by the door just quickly tap up and down on the control pad. You will slowly climb up the wall. It is possible to get stuck while using this trick.

      Super Mario World [gamefaqs.com]
      Go to World 1-2. At the pipe that leads to the flag, break two blocks so there's one at the end touching the pipe. Now duck and jump backward toward the brick (don't break it!). You should go through the wall and pipe into a warp zone. Jump down the first pipe you see and you will be in the Negative World (-1)!

      And so on and so on.

      Which brings me to my second point. The reason that there are more bugs on PC games is because there are a lot more ways that things can go wrong. On a console you have one set of hardware and maybe a few different controllers. You have a very small OS and no other programs running.

      PCs have untold billions of possible configurations, countless types of inputs, a very large and complicated (and buggy!) OS competing for RAM and mediating between your program and the hardware and who knows what other programs running in the background. There is no way that you can adequately test for this wide a variety of conditions and it is inevitable that you will run into unexpected problems when you ship the game.

      What have we learned today?
      1) Console games have lots anf lots of bugs. Anyone who says they don't is lying to you or stupid.
      2) PCs have more bugs than consoles because they do not have a unified configuration and there is lots that can go wrong.

      Thanks for coming out.

  • I hope... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quandrum ( 652868 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:04PM (#7649347)
    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... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Unholy_Kingfish ( 614606 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:15PM (#7649413) Homepage
      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.

      I guess you have never seen a child playing Pokeman?

    • Re:I hope... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @04:18PM (#7649798)
      "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.
    • How much can you do in a video game in a 8,544 hours?

      Playtimes of about 200 hours for not obsessed people is not uncommon, there is a lot more to do than just the story.

    • Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal and Ruby/Sapphire have two internal clocks actually--one records total playtime, and the other regulates the day cycles in the game.

      The berry system in either case is dictated by the Daily clock, and in all the history of Pokemon, I can't think of a single thing based on the total playtime. I think it's just there to remind kids when they've been playing too much and for bragging rights.

      In fact, most of the game's timed functions are either based on the daily clock or the numbe

  • In their defense... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bagels ( 676159 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @03:49PM (#7649633)
    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.
    • They knew there were time-dependent features... there should have been some mechanism to "fast-forward" the clock to after each unlock point and thoroughly test at each one.
  • It seems like Nintendo is intent on breaking, Pokemon, doesn't it?

    I mean, first they restrict the stat EXP system, which I felt was a jab at older, more serious players. Now, this. I had always hated the berry system of Ruby-Sapphire--I prefer the Gold/Silver/Crystal setup (Trees stay static, one berry a day). And now, this.

    I mean, I know they didn't forsee it... But somehow I feel cheated. In adition to the $24.99 my mother, stepfather and I paid for each game, we're going to have to pay extra money for

    • Postage Paid? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 )
      When my xbox controller died (the right analogue stick thought it was going left all the time) MS covered the postage and it was all handled easily and quickly. I too was expecting it to be somewhat painful, especially as I was within the last month of my warranty, but it ended up showing that customer service can be done right.
    • I wouldn't worry, NOA is spectacular at tech support. If the bug's in the American version, I figure you'll be able to either send the game at no cost to you or take it to an authorized repair center for free.
    • Christ. If your little cousins are going to be devastated because of the loss of berries in a Pokemon game, they have bigger problems than that. Even if they are devastated, they'll probably just be able to send their carts in. Get over it.
    • 1) Postage should be somewhere between $1-$5. 2) You might have to send it away to a regional center, since NOA has a bunch of local places certified to do hardware servicing. 3) The bug will probably exist here, as all NOA really does is localization, unless they caught it in their testing, start saving now. 4) Nintendo cares about their customers, heck they still carry hardware stuff for all the old consoles (not including Game n Watch)

  • Interesting insight to the cartrridge... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis AT ubasics DOT com> on Saturday December 06, 2003 @04:08PM (#7649743) Homepage Journal
    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
    • I've never played the game, don't own a gamepby, so i may be completely wrong, however, my guess is that you can save games on the cartridges and they are using part of the save game space to apply the patch.

      Didn't the original Zelda have a battery in the cartridge to keep saved games on it?
      • That would be my guess as well. Won't know until people get the cartridges back, but I can't imagine them literally replacing the hardware.

        And yes, original Zelda used a battery. One of first (if not the first) catridge game to do so. Probably the only real advantage to catridges that is taken advantage of anymore (the ability to add custom CPUs, a la original NES and occasionally SNES, just isn't taken advantage of anymore).

        • The NES did not have custom CPUs. It did have a universe of different ways to do bank switching (mappers) though.

          The SNES on the other hand, had many games with custom chips (SuperFX, etc). This can be read about here. [psxfanatics.com]

          To keep to the point, Nintendo will most likely have to replace the cartridges. The ROM in GBA cartridges is pretty fast, since most of the code is run directly from the ROM. Flash chips with that kind of performance is prohibitively expensive for games that cost about $40.

          • The NES did not have custom CPUs. It did have a universe of different ways to do bank switching (mappers) though.

            The MMC5 chip had a math module and replaced some other CPU functions (though admittedly most of it is simple things like the clock). Konami developed an LS1 chip that produced better sound and graphics. Of course most of the MMC chips were just that, Memory Mapping Chips.

            The SNES on the other hand, had many games with custom chips (SuperFX, etc). This can be read about here.

            The point still
    • You go knock yourself out in that massive 256K flash rom that's the biggest I think is available as a game save flash size. That's the same size as the WRAM (?) internal to the GBA that you can write to from your USB port with little fuss. Since the smallest games are 4MB, you're only 1/32nd of the way there!

      (Seriously. Buy the F2A - $100 isn't too much to pay to spend the rest of the GBA's lifespan avoiding true stinkers, and the homebrew scene is really pretty good this time around.)
    • It is not flashable. They simply copy the saved game over to a new cart.

  • 03/'04 - Nevar Forget (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr. Darl McBride ( 704524 ) on Saturday December 06, 2003 @08:03PM (#7650980)
    It was March of 2004. The start of the Pokecaust.

    Food would not grow, and Pikachu began to look for new food sources...

  • 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 nex
    • 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!

      Note that it's not after the player has 'played' the game for a year, but rather a year after the player first played it. It's mostly a semantic issue, but the player doesn't really have to have played the game long, they just have to have had it for a long time, and played it at least
      • Dear god my typos in the parent are bad! Anyhoo...

        Exactly. One would think that PC developers could afford to be a lot more gracious about patching games than Nintendo can afford to be because we are forgiving upfront since we know we mighht have some bizarre collection of outdated hardware and because it's 'relatively' cheap and fast to hand out fixes.

        But for some reason PC teams really don't seem very interested in this "patching till it's fixed" idea and a lot appear to basically have the attitude "We
    • Plenty of PC titles work out of the box for plenty of people. I've installed over two dozen games on this machine and all save one (Final Fantasy 7) worked right out of the box (that list includes Halo btw). But then again, you can't play FF7 at all on a gamecube - there's no issues with backwards compatibility save with the ps2, and there's absolutely no cross platform (aside from different versions of the same program). I know how to use my PC, how to configure it, and how to install games. And when I
      • I absolutely did not suggest that there be one PC configuration with one OS! And plenty of PC titles work for me out of the box as well. 2 dozen? Since you include FF7 I can only assume this is a dozen since the start of time. I have installed hundreds, and dozens HAVEN'T worked. Its just that on occasion a game won't work out of the box and the developer has been tardy to patch it if at all and has in some cases has just told the community to figuratively screw themselves. This is contrasted with Nintendo
        • I actually meant in the last three months (this is a brand new PC I built myself).

          So you are saying Halo needs patches for Hardware issues? Doesn't that prove my point? If everyone had one set of hardware, you woudn't need a patch for hardware issues would you? That's not an issue for Nintendo.

          Multiplayer problems? Again, not an issue for 99% of Nintendo games.

          The PS2 game Xenosaga has a glitch that causes it to freeze up if you return to a certain point in the game, preventing players who didn't get
  • A Digimon in a Pokemon game!? Madness!

    (For those who don't know, Digimon is short for digital monster with the entire anime series taking place in the cyberworld, specifically depends on which season you're talking about.)

  • Pokemon Fanatic.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by herrvinny ( 698679 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @10:19AM (#7653289)
    Before I start, I have to say that I am a pokemon fanatic (and proud of it too). I own a copy of Ruby, a copy of Sapphire, two Golds, one Crystal, one Silver, one Yellow, Blue, and Red. The wallpaper on all my computers is Pokemon themed, and I'm currently listening to the song "The Game" from the Totally Pokemon music CD.

    Okay, rant mode on.

    As soon as RS (Ruby/Sapphire) were released, I just *knew* there were going to be problems with the internal clock. I mean, how long could that battery last? And now we find out that there is a year limit to the berries? What idiot thought this up, or didn't plan for the eventuality that the game could surpass a year in usage? I have several thousand hours of play on my games (split among all my games, of course). For those of you who don't know, berries are a VERY important part of the game. Berries allow a pokemon to regain health by itself; otherwise, you have to skip a turn in battle to pull a potion out of your pack and apply it. And berries have to be mixed to create PokeBlocks, which up a Pokemon's stats. The PokeBlocks are also necessary in the Safari Zone, where you can't battle pokemon - pokemon to capture a pokemon, you have to throw stones and pokeblocks to entice the pokemon into getting into a pokeball.

    *deep breath*

    Okay, rant mode off

    • Re:Pokemon Fanatic.... (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      uhhh someone really needs a life.

    • Interesting story but i suggest you stop snacking on some of the local mushrooms man. But it gives me a fresh perspective on what's going on in pokemon world. Far more then i though =) Ok i'm off looking for that Safari Zone.
  • HOLY CRAP! I just bought the game yesterday for my nephew, who plays these games religiously. I hope he doesn't play it too long or I'm going to have to get his mother to tell him his Chinpokomon [tvtome.com] won't work!

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