Watch the internet play telephone!

Original Sound Version last week ran a story about the new Nintendo DS game from Level 5 being developed in concert with celebrated Anime production house Studio Ghibli. Their article cites an article in Nintendo Power which claims the new game, called Ninokuni: Another World, is shipping on the largest capacity DS cart ever made in order to accomodate the game’s orchestral score. The figure they use is “4GB”.

Now, if you are conversant with the ROM technology used for cart-based games you know they are measured in Mega-, or now Giga-, BITS. This is in contrast to RAM, Hard Drives and optical storage which are all measured in GigaBYTES. Even more confusing, when abbreviated it is proper to use an uppercase “B” to mean “bytes” and a lowercase “b” to mean “bits”. One byte is eight bits. Therefore 1Gb is equal to 128MB.

Are you with me? Since you no one uses bytes to describe the size of a ROM cartridge, the simple answer is that the author of this blog post made a simple transcription error, writing “4GB” when it was actually “4Gb”, or 512MBs. This makes a lot of sense since the biggest DS games so far have shipped on 2Gb, or 256MB carts.

But wait, it gets better! CVG reposted the story on their site, not realizing the error, and claiming this DS game is over twice as big as the 1.8GB UMDs used by the PSP. Destructoid saw it at CVG and did the same exact thing.

On all three blogs people have posted comments to correct the error, but so far no edits have been made. Apparently for these outlets it seems more likely that Ninokuni is 16 times larger than any other DS game ever made, than someone somewhere accidentally used an uppercase letter when they should have used a lowercase one.