Pokemon Fainted

Despite lighting up the sales charts and earning decent reviews, Pokémon Sword and Shield has been the subject of some pretty negative press recently.

Some of its appears justified – such as reports that the digital version of the game is corrupting people's SD cards and sending their Roku boxes crazy – while other stories need to be taken with a slightly larger pinch of salt.

Take, for example, a recent post on Reddit which suggests that the game – via its use (or abuse, rather) of the Switch's NAND memory – is slowly but surely killing consoles all over the globe.

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The trigger was a Twitter post which shows a Switch console displaying a blue screen of death. A Pastebin has been established for crash reports seemingly related to this issue, and the following text tries to sum up the crux of the problem:

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As is often the case with these highly emotive stories, reports have now spread across Twitter and people are taking it upon themselves to warn others off even loading up Pokémon Sword and Shield. However, almost immediately, voices of reason have entered the conversation to pour cold water over these reports.

Prolific Pokémon modder SciresM – the same person who managed to hack Omastar into the game – has responded to the rumours, calling them "bait" and "obviously false". He also points out that, as games, Sword and Shield have no special access privileges and would not be permitted by the Switch OS to access the NAND:

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The question remains – what is causing the blue screens on Switch consoles? Could Sword and Shield – which push the host hardware pretty hard – but a contributing factor? We'll no doubt find out in due course, but it's pretty certain that the game accessing the console's NAND is not the cause here.

As ever, let us know if you have any insight into this issue by posting a comment below.

[source reddit.com]