Many gamers like myself have been waiting on pin missiles and needle arms for tomorrow’s scheduled release of Pokemon Bank and Transporter, the two 3DS apps that would bring cloud storage to the series for the first time. Not only were users promised a free legendary Pokemon with Celebi, but these programs would allow gamers to transfer over all of the Pokemon that they’ve captured over the last 10 years into their new copies of Pokemon X and Y, so it’s not hard to see why the release was so highly anticipated.
In fact, the only ones who apparently couldn’t see it was Nintendo themselves.
Possibly due to the large influx of new consoles connecting to Nintendo’s servers on Christmas, combined with the Japanese release of Bank, the entire Nintendo Network has been down for nearly 24 hours. Gamers all over the Internet have reported not being able to access the eShop, download their digital games that were bundled with their consoles, and have lost online function in certain games.
Due to the incident, Nintendo has pulled Bank from the Japanese eShop. Furthermore, those who were able to get onto the eShop in Europe and here in the States have pointed out that the release date has been switched from December 27th to “TBD.” It’s safe to say that some more prep might have to go into launching the applications for the rest of the world.
It’s not uncommon for popular downloads to crash servers. After all, the PSN and Steam stores went down yesterday, the latter due to the free Left 4 Dead 2 giveaway yesterday. Without an official statement on the delay, I’m crossing my fingers that Nintendo will have things in order by tomorrow. However, when you consider that millions of people from around the world will be connecting at the same time when the Japanese region alone was a huge reason for the Network to crash, well… let’s just say that a shiny Mew in the Wonder Trade is more likely at this point.
If anything, I hope we get an extra legendary for the inconvenience. Jirachi perhaps? As always, check back with Geekscape for any official updates.