Over 2 years after the American launch

 Someone mentioned magical melodies, which still hasn't been released in PAL regions (well, at least in Ausland).. anyways, I just wanted to inform you that (in Australia at least, i assume all PAL regions) Magical Melody will be getting a Wii make over (cough, waggle controls).. My best guess is to stop us from realising that they are going to delay the hell out of the actual Harvest Moon Wii game..

 Yeah, and for good reason. If they started charging you $80 to $100 a game, slowed it down, reduced the resolution and gave you everything 8 months later than other English speaking nations, you'd say a big Fuck You to the publishers as well.

Porting to the UK should cost very little.

Porting to the UK should never take months.

Marketing here is pathetic anyway.

The EU market is almost twice the size of the Japanese market.

The UK market is by far the largest in Europe.

The games made to cater specifically to Europeans are so infrequent that I suspect there's a huge untapped market for Euro-centric games.

Games released in America flop all the time: maybe they'd find a market here. Not even trying a game here sounds stupid to me.

Nintendo has never won a home console generation in the UK (just about the only nation where this is true). Even the Game Gear held up well against Game Boy here.

Being Irish, I sypathise greatly with this:

It's brilliant that Americans are sitting here telling us how we shouldn't moan about something they've never had to experience - Europe and Oceania being completely blanked, and still expected to cough up serious cash (sometimes double that of the US) to get our hands on them.

Animal crossing Gamecube came out 2 years after it did in Japan!

We pay so much more for an inferior product coming out much later that it would drive you insane....and it's so unneccisary, we all speak English, why not let us have the games at the same time?

Punishing Gamers for Using PAL is why Nintendo never had much of a foothold in Europe.

What I don't understand:
Why does translating for europen languages does take place after the game is out in japanese or english language ?

Doesn't that mean ,that the script is rdy and could be copied and translated into whatever language the same time the english/japanese version is made ?

Because Nintendo of Europe are useless cuds - They're a puppet who just distribute and market, they don't publish (unlike NOA and NOJ), which might explain the complete absence of European content (UK and French devs work more with Sony) and apathy on both sides.

It's very frustrating for Irish and British gamers - we speak the same language (in fact, our neighbours the English invented it - obvious but important) yet we get sub- standard treatment, we wait for translations we're not using, and we pay a bucketload for every game and console.

It wouldn't be so bad if Europe was a small market but it's not.

Wasn't it the sega dreamcast that had 60hz in almost every game as standard first?

At first glance this sounds like reasonable explanation, but it really doesn't explain why Sony gained groud by fucking up PAL just as badly as Nintendo, Sega and Atari before it. Basically solution for this would be making a "PAL english" region, which would include UK and Australia and make region locked games for this region. Oh wait, but that would be fucking up the customer.

NOE does publish games... All Nintendo published games in Europe, are published by NOE, just like games in Americas are published by NOA. Does Nintendo have it's internal studio in the US?

You know, the difference in games prices aren't so big as you think, if i recall, when USD and EUR ratio is 1€=1,18$, the central-European price is equal to price in the US. 

I easilly can understand why UK have to wait for the european localisation, it's because UK is in EU, and therefore every game released in UK, means that the game is released everywhere in the EU. But for Australia, i think it doesn't have any other basis than that it's PAL. Which sucks.

@Rol: Also Geist was 60Hz only. 

@Lafiel: That's how it should be done. Translate the game before it's released anywhere. Just like EA does. But EA fucks up Japan really badly. Or how do you want to think that.

From Japan to NA, the game is translated much faster than from NA (or Japan) to PAL-region. You have to translate it to only one language, which is english,  to  PAL-region, the game is translated to 4 languages (the games that are translated, that is). Also translation between, TV standards, NTSC in Japan and NTSC in NA, is easier, faster and cheaper, than NTSC to PAL. So it really takes more time. 

Why not  releasing  PAL first and NA afterwards, they would have translation ready for the french-speaking canadians.

 I'm from Australia...

Either

1) Cop it.

 or

2) Be Smart and Import if you don't like it. 

So, basically forget they are screwing you over, and 1) wait and pay them, or 2) don't wait but still pay them... I realise this analysis will do little to nothing, but I just thought that it was an interesting look at how we are treated as gamers in these regions and thought people might be interested to have a look at it