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Comment by Vivtek | Hacker News Reader

It's a problem for Nintendo, believe it or not. My 13-year-old son saved up to buy a game now that we've relocated to Hungary - the chip wouldn't even load on his American 3DS. Insane. Fortunately he got store credit, but ... why in the world?

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Yet another win for piracy. It's amusing to hear people complain about all these things. It doesn't matter what country I'm in, my private torrent site functions without any problems.

Though it's not connected to the comment you commented upon but I recently tried buying some music at one of my country's leading online stores (Flipkart) and the MP3s (no choice of other formats) were of poor quality and without any ID3 tags or so. After almost a week's <me-customer support-me> game, I gave up and acquired the songs from TPB (or IPT maybe). This time there was no guilt :-)

Same here. I'm living in Quebec for the next few months, and I had to order the last Pokemon in Europe (and pay shipping, hurrah !) to be able to play.

What's the justification ? "Region dependant features" (sorry ? you have to lock the hardware instead of enabling/disabling features at runtime ?), and "parental access" (well, I'm over 18, and I allow me to play. It doesn't seem enough in the Nintendo world, however).

Really, region-lock sucks.

The justification is probably licensing. The content owners may have separate exclusivity deals with different publishers in different countries.

I heard about this recently, iirc it's new to the 3DS. I was surprised, because in the past Nintendo systems have been pretty apathetic regarding regional restrictions. I have two Japanese DS lites which play fine (Japan and US games, others too presumably).

    in the past Nintendo systems have been pretty apathetic regarding regional restrictions

Not sure I'd agree with that. Even the snes/famicom used differently shapes cartridges to block importing.

I guess it was just hearsay then. I'm not much of a gamer but my friends never seemed to have any complaints and I do recall mixing and matching now and again (though on what systems I'm going to be second guessing from now on). Apparently the Gamecube had region protection as well.

Nintendo's home consoles have always been region-locked, via intentional hardware differences on the NES/Famicom, SNES, and n64, and via software means on everything newer. The Game Boy line and original DS (including DS Lite) are not region-locked at all. The DSi is regioned for DSi-enabled software, including DS/DSi hybrid software like Pokémon Black and White. The 3DS is region-locked in software.

Portable systems (Gamebox, GBA, DS) used to have no region locking.

Nor should they.

Up to the 3DS, I could play games from anywhere (I like Japanese games a lot). I have happily purchased three different generations of Nintendo portable machines and the software to go with them.

I have not purchased the 3DS.

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