Nintendo Wii U: No import games allowed!

The Gadget Show  Tuesday 25 September 2012

The Nintendo Wii U hits stores in little over two months’ time, and while we’re excited by the launch window line-up that boasts everything from Nintendoland to Mass Effect 3, we’ve heard a bit of bad news too this week. Like the Wii before it, the Nintendo Wii U will be region locked, stopping you from playing games bought elsewhere.

The Nintendo Wii U, which uses a touchscreen controller gamepad and goes on sale starting 30 November in the UK, will be region locked according to video games mag CVG. That means only games bought in Europe will work on European machines: if you want to play a game released only in Japan, you can’t import it – it simply won’t work.

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As CVG points out, this has been Nintendo’s policy ever since the NES first launched in the 1980s, but it’s caused uproar before, especially since Sony and Microsoft aren’t nearly so strict. Last year, after months of campaigning, Nintendo America finally brought the Japanese Wii roleplaying game Xenoblade Chronicles to the US and Canada, earning a big dose of bad publicity along the way caused entirely by region locking.

Will this put you off buying the Nintendo Wii U? Let’s hear where you stand in the comments below.

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