So like a moron, I did not bring the game box for Digimon World Championship with me to Harrisburg, so I won't be able to send the game back to my masters in Gamespotland until I arrive home in New York tonight. Seeing as I still have the game on hand, and I didn't bring any other games with me this week, I started fiddling around with it for a couple of minutes yesterday. Apparently, there's some combination of cages that causes the game to crash.

Yeah.

A little background, if you don't want to read through my review. In Digimon World Championship, you increase your Digimon's abilities by dropping the suckers into cages. The way the whole cage dealie works is that you've got this hexagonal grid of empty space. (The amount of empty space you're alotted increases as you win battles.) As you earn money from battles, you can buy more and different cages to increase your speed, HP, defense, special abilities, special character traits, whatever. These cages range from very small (one hexagon large) to very large (a five-hex mass).

So, in the Cage Edit mode, I was dumping in a bunch of healing cages next to each other just for kicks and giggles. At this point, all of my empty hex spaces were filled, and I was maxed out in terms of how much space I could gain (well duh, seeing as I had to play it all the way through). After I tapped the Exit button, the game just went to a black screen. No music. No frozen garbled stuff (a la NES). Nothing. I had to hit the power button.

I tried a different combination of cages -- no crash. I thought it might be that I filled the entire grid, which makes no sense since after the 8-hour mark I had had all of my hexes filled, but it was worth a shot, so I tried the original combination that crashed (for those who are playing, I believe it was a healing spa, then a mini-infirmary, then an infirmary -- all lined up next to each other on the bottom row of hexes) and took away a random hexagonal cage -- CRASH.

Reviewers are not bug testers. Their job is not to test out every combination of every single thing for defects. However, I really, really wish I had found this during my reviewing session so I could inform prospective buyers of this up-front. It wouldn't have impacted the score because the game auto-saves after each in-game day, and unless you do things drastically different within a given day, the events -- even battles -- are almost predictable (maybe a Digimon evolves an in-game hour after it did the first time before your game crashes, big whoop). But it's information that I think is valuable to know.

There may be more crashy combinations out there, so, buyer beware. Save your game -- as annoying as it may be to shut off and turn your DS on again (that's what manually saving forces you to do) -- every time before going into Cage Edit mode. Or better yet, take my 5.5 to heart and just don't buy the game.