Leap day is now upon us and a couple of games aren’t happy about this sudden affront to their usual calendar expectations. Both EA Sports WRC and Theatrhythm Final Bar Line are currently protesting at the arrival of 29th February by refusing to function on consoles – but, luckily for rally fans and beat tappers, there’s a pretty straightforward workaround.
Theatrhythm Final Bar Line players noticed the Final Fantasy-themed PS4 and Switch rhythm game was failing to connect to Square Enix’s servers after the clock struck midnight heralding the arrival 29th February, leaving it functionally unplayable.
Similarly, EA took to social media earlier today to acknowledge Codemasters’ World Championship Rally was encountering an “issue on console in which the game may crash on startup.” And while it didn’t explicitly blame the problem on today’s leap year, the publisher’s follow-up solution makes it clear 29th February is the culprit.
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In both cases, the workaround is thankfully simple, merely requiring users to manually nudge their system’s clock forward to 1st March. If you don’t know how to do that, EA’s support has detailed the steps for Xbox and PlayStation in a series of tweets – and while Square is yet to publicly acknowledge the issues affecting Theatrhythm, the solution (as confirmed by Vooks) is exactly the same. We call this the Resetti Manoeuvre.
So there you go; leap day disaster averted. Will Square Enix and EA have fixes in place to stop a repeat incident next time around? We’ll know in four years.
