I know but then again  as I said before

"In a world of shitty micro transactions   (and Region Locking being a matter of firmware etc  and not hardware) Why dont they allow me to buy Japanese games or US games and pay a 10dollar UNLOCK FEE  so this one single game is playable on my system?  Better than no game at all." 


You know like selling  individual region free patches  like selling Wiiware games.

as long as we get the games released in our region i don't care... but this gen pissed me off as far as good Wii games not releasing in my region goes

Sega did the same with the MegaDrive/Genesis!

But by breaking 2 little bits of plastic the cartridges the problem was solved.

OT. I can't believe how many people complain, like if this is something new. I've never had a doubt that it would be this way.

Damn ... I would even pay that with a smiling face ...

shame you arent a ceo of a jp gamecompany :(

I've never been interested in buying a game from the PAL regions (Xenoblade was the only time I even considered it) so this doesn't affect me too much. But I can see how this will annoy some people.

At times it makes me wonder if some of us are the only intelligent people on this planet. That is a super smart idea. Let people pay if they want a game that badly. With the current solution, we're just faced with a middle finger and all we want to do is pull it back.

Now I can't bring my Harvest Moon games over here... sigh...

Too bad, it would have been the moment to drop that. But when you look at the bigger picture it's not going to change much : few people play in Japanese and most games get a simultaneous US/EU release. Only people like me who massively import games from Japan will be penalized. Now if I am indeed going to buy WiiU I have to buy a Japanese one. One more reason to keep the the wait and see approach

Ugh I hate region locked consoles. I travel around a lot, it sucks for me.

Bolded parts: As an European gamer, I strongly have to disagree.

The DS was not region locked (except for DSi downloads and a few other DSi specific cartridges). I imported lots of Japanese DS games which were localized for US but not for EU, mainly RPGs: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, Etrian Odyssey II, Glory of Heracles, Knights in the Nightmare, Nostalgia, Radiant Historia, Sands of Destruction, Summon Night: Twin Age, The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, plus the unique adventure game 999 - 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. Some great games.

Additionally, there were plenty of other good to great Japanese games which were localized for US but not for EU (and which I didn't buy), e.g. Etrian Odyssey III, The Dark Spire, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 1+2, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier, Theresia: Dear Emile, Tokyo Beat Down, Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2.

Finally, there even were a few very interesting US games which were never released in Europe either, such as Contra 4 and Robocalypse.

If the DS would've been region locked, I would have been forced to either buy two DS systems, EU+US, or to buy an US system and import all DS games from US, even the ones which got a separate EU release.

So, depending on the system region-locking actually can be an issue - it would have been a huge issue for me and other EU gamers on DS, it would have been an issue on PSP (Jeanne D'Arc, to name one great PSP game which was never released in EU) and it probably will be an issue on 3DS - and keeping a system region-free is actually not complicated, not for Sony and obviously not even for Nintendo.

I agree though that region-locking wasn't a big issue for Wii and I hope it will be the same for Wii U.