Japanese government auction for used Nintendo DS listing suddenly disappears as the internet realizes, oops, those bundled games are actually flash carts and likely packed with pirated titles

An auction for a used Nintendo DS from the Japanese government created a minor stir when the internet realized that it came bundled with a set of flash carts – you know, the exact sort typically used to play pirated games. The listing, as you might imagine, pretty quickly disappeared once that revelation took hold.

Officials of the Tottori Prefecture listed a thoroughly yellowed Nintendo DS Lite for auction with an estimated price of 1,000 yen, or just under $7 USD, sometime earlier this month, as Automaton reports. While the console's clearly seen better days, that's still a great price for the system, especially since it came bundled with three game cartridges.

But hold on – it's actually just one game cartridge, a copy of New Super Mario Bros., alongside R4 and Acekard 2 flash carts. According to one (machine translated) tweet about the listing, these government auctions often involve items seized from delinquent taxpayers, so it's likely that nobody involved in the listing had any idea what these carts were actually for.

Flash carts can be used for perfectly legal purposes like running homebrew software, but the vast majority of players use them to store and play pirated games. Certainly, in a world where Nintendo is turning pirates into what amounts to indentured servants and even charity speedrun events are running afoul of the publisher's beliefs about its copyrights, I doubt that a government entity wants to be caught selling anything that even smells of piracy.

These are the best DS games that you can legally purchase through secondhand retailers.