No international presents, Virtual Console gifts are region locked

By Spencer . December 10, 2007 . 6:05pm

vcpres.jpgI’ve been waiting for the gift feature to go live to I could try an experiment. I wanted to see if it was possible to send a Japanese virtual console game to a US Wii. If this was successful, it could be a nifty trick for gamers to get their hands on digital imports. My hypothesis was it wouldn’t work and Nintendo would region lock the virtual console games. But why not try it, right?

 

I logged on my Japanese Wii to send Gradius II, a Japanese virtual console game, over to my US Wii. After a few seconds of waiting a message came up explaining that the user I was sending the gift to (i.e. me) could not receive it because they are in a different region. Maybe this didn’t work because there isn’t a US equivalent for Gradius II. To be sure, I turned on my US Wii and tried to send a game that was available in the Japanese Virtual Console shop. I picked the Legend of Zelda and the gift didn’t go through either.

 

The news is predictable, but it’s still disappointing. Nintendo preemptively plugged up a potentially awesome loophole.


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  • Aoshi00

    Dang, no getting Treasure Hunter G that way… even if it works now, Nintendo would probably send a new update disabling it, like w/ the freeloader.. guess we lost all hopes of playing imports w/o actually getting a Jpn system.

  • TT

    So, if I get this right, you(Spencer) live in Japan and have a Japanese and American Wii.
    When you turn on your American Wii, you connect the American Wii site and of course Japanese Wii connects to the Japanese site. But, then you cannot send your American account a Japanese game. Interesting. I was thinking about the same thing but didnt get around to trying it.

    I guess you can load the Japanese game to an SD card and load it to your US Wii?

    My friend has a Japanese Wii in US and can only connect to the Japanese site. So, I guess Wii is region locked by the hardware, not the IP address. This is not how Xbox360 works as I think it reads IP address.

  • Aaron Rudkin

    Actually, it’s not just region locked. It’s COUNTRY locked. Canadians cannot send to the US and vice-versa. Europe is entirely screwed. Nintendo dropped the ball BIGTIME here.

  • http://www.siliconera.com Spencer

    @TT – Actually I live in America now, I bounce between countries. But you pretty much got it! Japanese Wiis connect to the Japanese VC store, American Wiis connect to the US store. Also you can’t use SD cards to play games either since they are locked to the console. :(

    @Aaron – Oh… now that is really interesting. You can’t even transfer games between the US and Canada? Now that is surprising news!

  • TT

    thanks for the info!

    I wish Xbox worked that, way, if it did, I could buy an American 360 to connect to the American marketplace from Japan and get my occasional US movie/television fix.

    Yeah, Nintendo doesnt have to be so uptight about this. I think Xbox region coded probably because of pressure from Disney. I think this because I remember that ever since Disney movies were available on the Marketplace I have not been able to connect from Japan.

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