Wii update kills Twilight Princess hack, but not Homebrew Channel…and blocks Freeload

Today’s Wii update was a stab in the heart for a portion of the community. The long-running Twilight Princess hack has been put to rest. On the flip-side, the Homebrew Channel that was whipped up seems to be just fine. I wonder if Nintendo purposefully went after the TP hack, but wanted to leave the window open for homebrew. More should develop on this story as the night continues on. Thanks to Kolma for the heads up!

UPDATE - Word is, this latest update blocks the Freeloader as well. Can anyone confirm this with a picture? If so…shoot me an email.

I known a couple of people that purchase the Freeloader and imported SSBB since European release was up in the air. Even with the a date set, a number of people already imported the title. Instead of waiting until this month while the U.S. got the game back March. So, people living in U.K., who imported SSBB will either have to buy another copy, the PAL version, then sell the U.S. version. Oh, not to mention the Freeloader is worthless. I'm sure there's quite a number of consumers not happy regarding this issue.

On a side note, what's the TP hack?

Australia (and as a by-product, New Zealand) is often a target of Regional Lockouts, as companies find they can charge a much higher price in Australia than the equivalent cost of a game or DVD in the United States or the UK. This was originally blamed on a weak Australian Dollar and import costs, but as the Australian Dollar rose, and import costs fell, the majority of companies refused to drop their prices, as they found that the market would tolerate high prices regardless of other concerns.

A major example is in Video Games, which often cost double their equivalent price in the UK or the United States. Games often sell for ₤25 GBP or $50 USD in these countries, but in Australia games will be sold on release at $100, which is equivalent to ₤45 GBP or $93 US Dollars, twice the cost or higher of the same game in the US or the UK.

On Valve software's Steam digital distribution system, THQ have locked out Australian users from buying their games. This is because the cost of Steam games is in US Dollars, and since the resurgence of the AUD to over 0.90c USD, it is not as profitable to sell over Steam as it is to sell at retail. These decisions have been immensely criticised by disgruntled prospective customers.[citation needed]

An example of this cost difference between retail and steam is Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. On Steam, the price is $29.95 USD, which is equal to $32 Australian Dollars. At retail stores (both online and "brick and mortar" stores) the game retails for approximately $80 AUD, which is equivalent to $75 USD. This difference of over $45 US Dollars ($48 Australian Dollars) has caused THQ to block the sale of the game over Steam to Australia, and as such the game is invisible to an Australian user, either in the steam client or on the steam website. If any attempt is made to purchase the game by using a non-Australian version of the Steam Website, a "territory error" is shown and the game will not be able to be purchased.

In some countries, however, regional restrictions are explicitly discouraged. For example, in Hong Kong parallel imports are expressly allowed, while Australian copyright law permits users to circumvent region locks for media that they otherwise legally own.

For Europe, it makes sense why it takes so long because they need to do all the translations and all that crap and it can end up being a nightmare doing it for all the different languages over there. For example, it would've taken quite a lot of effort to have all the voices recorded for all of the characters in Brawl:


But then there's Australia where all we speak is English. Despite being a very multicultural country, if you don't speak English and you live in this country, you're going to find it very difficult to get anything done. All that needs to be done is for games to be converted into the PAL colour system (which doesn't take much), a 60Hz label to be printed on the back and there ya go, the game will be released a week after the US at the very latest and they can proceed to rip us off more quickly with their overly high prices.

I think Trauma Center Second Opinion is going to be released (FINALLY) in July or something in Europe/Australia...

You know, if companies from the UK and Australia got together, they could probably force a way to get games released early for our regions and not be piled together with Europe...

The main reason they pile these other English speaking nations in with the rest of Europe is the PAL video standard. That limitation should've ended in the DVD era because by that time, PAL TVs were fully capable of of running 60Hz signals (NTSC standard). And now we're getting into Bluray which COMPLETELY bypasses those ancient standards... yet they still separate regions by NTSC and PAL even though those standards should be a thing of the past.

The great thing is that Nintendo is to blame for region locking in videogames since they're the ones who introduced it with the NES... the only console they have which is region free is the Nintendo DS... I'm not sure if the GBA was region free though *thinks* probably not.

Also, despite the PSP and PS3 being region free, Sony still discourages retailers from even giving people the idea that buying games/hardware from different regions is okay. I love how that works XD