19th June 2013, 2:56 PM
Nintendo is in a tough position when it comes to "region free gaming", although it is one of their own creation.
Nintendo's handheld systems were region free up to and including the DS, but that changed with the DSi, which implemented region locking but only for the digital purchases (DS cartridge games were still region free, which makes sense as there would be no way to back port any sort of way to identify the region the DS carts belonged to). Starting with the 3DS, the cartridges became region locked as well. This is disappointing, but I think it is related to the way Nintendo handles both their online stores and the built in firmware across regions. More on that later. In particular, the 3DS allows the sale of all cartridge games in digital form, so making the games basically identical was very convenient, and that included region based coding.
When it comes to consoles, Nintendo has always been region locked. During the NES days, this made sense for a lot of reasons. The Japanese Famicom had no copyright protection at all, but they wanted to stem the tide of piracy so starting with the American NES revision of the Famicom, Nintendo added copyright protection. This was also done in Europe. Now, Europe and America used differing signal timings on their TV sets (NTSC and PAL, as we all know). Back then, this meant they couldn't risk the fallback if someone got it in their head to import an American version of a game and found the game didn't work correctly at all, possibly even damaging something in the PAL NES. There wasn't much between the game code and the raw hardware back then. The easy route was simply to make the copyright protection chip also serve as a region locking chip. Bam, problem solved.
This would continue for some time. This sort of reasoning explains why a US SNES can play Japanese Super Famicom games, but not European games. The region locking on the chip was used exclusively to prevent any legal issues with mismatched signal timing or any harm that might cause to either the games or the system (or even the TV). However, with the SNES and N64 after, Nintendo also implemented a rather cheap method of region locking beyond the chip, they altered the shape of the cartridge and slot. This can be easily defeated with a dremel tool, but clearly Nintendo felt that region locking was important. Apparently, tracking sales based on region was deemed important enough to be worth the cost in lost sales. It is worth noting that similar region locking policies were used by both Sega and Sony.
Today, there is very little reason to use region locking to prevent PAL/NTSC issues, as everyone is moving on to HDTV and the OSes of the various game systems tend to handle timing issues more than the games themselves anyway. Game importing is now seen as less important an issue than piracy. I suspect that rather than motivate people to get their systems "modded" to allow for playing imported games, which also would mean giving them the ability to play pirated copies of games, Sony felt it would be in their best interests to just remove region locking altogether.
That leaves Nintendo. The problem with Nintendo these days has a lot to do with their poor implementation of their OSes across their modern game systems, and also how online store regions are handled. When it comes to Microsoft and Sony, they have ONE version of the operating system across all regions. It just looks for a preset bit when the system was first set up to determine which region it is in, and goes from there. The American US can be set to "Japanese mode" very easily just by changing the language, except in regards to things like X/O confirmation. Those have to be set through hacking, but both capabilities still exist in the OS, it is simply a sort of "registry setting" that needs to be edited, nothing deeper than that. The same goes for the XBox 360 operating system. However, Nintendo's operating systems are different. They actually recompile a different version for every region. This is actually how the OSes of the original Playstation, Sega CD, and a number of other older game consoles with operating systems functioned. This was deemed easier due to space limitations, but that is no longer an issue today. Simply put, there IS no Japanese mode on a US Wii U. It doesn't exist because all of those options were removed when they recompiled it with the English settings. They may also add Spanish and French as language options, but that's just because they wanted to cover a whole region with one version. They didn't think far enough to simply go a step further and cover the whole world with one version. Part of the path to solving the issue with Nintendo's region locking lies in making the effort to unify the various region versions of the Wii U and 3DS OSes into a single unified OS (well, two actually, since it's two systems we're talking about here). That would eliminate any irregularities between versions and their use of the OS, but there is another issue that needs tackling.
The online store fronts are also region locked. This is also true for the 360 and Playstation stores. However, with those you can "spoof" your way into them by simply creating an account and faking an address in the region you want to see the store for. This is impossible on Nintendo systems, since as I mentioned coding for those regions simply isn't there. Also, the system and account are linked far too deeply, so it is nearly impossible to really do much further than that. Unifying the OSes would go one step further, but also allowing the user to simply go into whatever region they want without any "tricks" would go further towards that issue.
Nintendo would need to do some major underlying changes to really eliminate region locking at this point. It is possible, but Nintendo would need to show a stronger commitment to recoding their operating systems after the initial version. They have made a few admirable steps towards that this generation, but there's still a long way to go there.
Nintendo's handheld systems were region free up to and including the DS, but that changed with the DSi, which implemented region locking but only for the digital purchases (DS cartridge games were still region free, which makes sense as there would be no way to back port any sort of way to identify the region the DS carts belonged to). Starting with the 3DS, the cartridges became region locked as well. This is disappointing, but I think it is related to the way Nintendo handles both their online stores and the built in firmware across regions. More on that later. In particular, the 3DS allows the sale of all cartridge games in digital form, so making the games basically identical was very convenient, and that included region based coding.
When it comes to consoles, Nintendo has always been region locked. During the NES days, this made sense for a lot of reasons. The Japanese Famicom had no copyright protection at all, but they wanted to stem the tide of piracy so starting with the American NES revision of the Famicom, Nintendo added copyright protection. This was also done in Europe. Now, Europe and America used differing signal timings on their TV sets (NTSC and PAL, as we all know). Back then, this meant they couldn't risk the fallback if someone got it in their head to import an American version of a game and found the game didn't work correctly at all, possibly even damaging something in the PAL NES. There wasn't much between the game code and the raw hardware back then. The easy route was simply to make the copyright protection chip also serve as a region locking chip. Bam, problem solved.
This would continue for some time. This sort of reasoning explains why a US SNES can play Japanese Super Famicom games, but not European games. The region locking on the chip was used exclusively to prevent any legal issues with mismatched signal timing or any harm that might cause to either the games or the system (or even the TV). However, with the SNES and N64 after, Nintendo also implemented a rather cheap method of region locking beyond the chip, they altered the shape of the cartridge and slot. This can be easily defeated with a dremel tool, but clearly Nintendo felt that region locking was important. Apparently, tracking sales based on region was deemed important enough to be worth the cost in lost sales. It is worth noting that similar region locking policies were used by both Sega and Sony.
Today, there is very little reason to use region locking to prevent PAL/NTSC issues, as everyone is moving on to HDTV and the OSes of the various game systems tend to handle timing issues more than the games themselves anyway. Game importing is now seen as less important an issue than piracy. I suspect that rather than motivate people to get their systems "modded" to allow for playing imported games, which also would mean giving them the ability to play pirated copies of games, Sony felt it would be in their best interests to just remove region locking altogether.
That leaves Nintendo. The problem with Nintendo these days has a lot to do with their poor implementation of their OSes across their modern game systems, and also how online store regions are handled. When it comes to Microsoft and Sony, they have ONE version of the operating system across all regions. It just looks for a preset bit when the system was first set up to determine which region it is in, and goes from there. The American US can be set to "Japanese mode" very easily just by changing the language, except in regards to things like X/O confirmation. Those have to be set through hacking, but both capabilities still exist in the OS, it is simply a sort of "registry setting" that needs to be edited, nothing deeper than that. The same goes for the XBox 360 operating system. However, Nintendo's operating systems are different. They actually recompile a different version for every region. This is actually how the OSes of the original Playstation, Sega CD, and a number of other older game consoles with operating systems functioned. This was deemed easier due to space limitations, but that is no longer an issue today. Simply put, there IS no Japanese mode on a US Wii U. It doesn't exist because all of those options were removed when they recompiled it with the English settings. They may also add Spanish and French as language options, but that's just because they wanted to cover a whole region with one version. They didn't think far enough to simply go a step further and cover the whole world with one version. Part of the path to solving the issue with Nintendo's region locking lies in making the effort to unify the various region versions of the Wii U and 3DS OSes into a single unified OS (well, two actually, since it's two systems we're talking about here). That would eliminate any irregularities between versions and their use of the OS, but there is another issue that needs tackling.
The online store fronts are also region locked. This is also true for the 360 and Playstation stores. However, with those you can "spoof" your way into them by simply creating an account and faking an address in the region you want to see the store for. This is impossible on Nintendo systems, since as I mentioned coding for those regions simply isn't there. Also, the system and account are linked far too deeply, so it is nearly impossible to really do much further than that. Unifying the OSes would go one step further, but also allowing the user to simply go into whatever region they want without any "tricks" would go further towards that issue.
Nintendo would need to do some major underlying changes to really eliminate region locking at this point. It is possible, but Nintendo would need to show a stronger commitment to recoding their operating systems after the initial version. They have made a few admirable steps towards that this generation, but there's still a long way to go there.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)