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DS Handheld to be Region Free
Thanks to GamingHeadlines for the news that DS games are not going to be region restricted. "Although this news may not specifically cater to American and Japanese folks, it certainly gives us Europeans the benefit of importing our DS systems from abroad..." I certainly think it caters to US gamers. Imported Japanese games can lead to wonderful things.
Sidebar: will it really be cheaper for Europeans to import their systems from Asia as opposed to North America, though? Anybody?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
To the best of my knowledge, the only region locked handhelds were the TurboExpress and the Nomad. But it should be pointed out that both these units were actually handheld versions of home game consoles (TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis, respectfully), and as such inherited their regional locks.
I've never understood why regional locks seem to be so crucial to the software models of home game consoles, and yet so undesirable in the portable market. The only reason I can see for the difference is to cater to international travellers. Are the sales to inter-region travels really that significant?
Must... think up... something... clever!
Apparently, the PSP will be soprt a region lock too...Sony probably can't do better than that.
Just physically change the structure of the cartridge a tiny bit for each region so it doesn't fit, by subtracting or adding a notch in the corners, forcing people to either use awkward adaptors ( doubly awkward for a portable platform ) or physically destroying the complementing notch in their gameboy, most likely voiding their warranty. This level of discouragement is probably enough.
My hunch on why they don't bother with any lockouts is that there isn't as much of a blockbuster game driven economy with gameboy games. There is very rarely a game that comes out that everybody goes nuts and has to go buy like on console systems. Pokemon would be the closest thing to that, and it's extremely language bound. Furthermore, it's very link oriented, discouraging people from buying a game they won't be able to link to hardly anybody with later.
Wouldn't be so sure. I'm pretty sure some EU countries have specific legislation that says that manuals and packaging have to be translated, but I'm pretty sure it's not an EU-wide law.
For comparison, almost all of PC games released in Finland have English packaging and manuals. Some distributors/importers thoughtfully provide installation instructions in Finnish - I have a vague recollection that this was a recommendation from the consumer ombudsman - but full-blown localisation of the game is really rare.
And even so, on Gamecube and GBA, I only see games with translations from Nintendo and pretty rarely from other publishers - the bigger the publisher the more likely there's German and French game translations. I have several games with only English game text, though. It's even more blatant with manuals - here Nintendo seems to be the only game publisher that provides Finnish manuals, though some games only come with a paper sheet with a summary.
Um, in short, it's a publisher's fault, not EU's. =)
But I agree that failure to publish due to language problems is pretty silly. (or maybe that's just an opinion from someone from a country that would be a localizer's nightmare, but luckily the inhabitants have grown used to missing localization =)
European released carts always have a language selector, which delays access to the game.
Not necessarily. If a console supports setting the systemwide locale, then a language select menu delays access to the console's first boot by ten seconds or less and does not delay access to subsequent boots of the console no matter which game you insert. Even without a systemwide locale setting in the console's BIOS, developers can put locale settings on a memory card or on the Game Pak; for instance Super Smash Bros. (U), Super Smash Bros. Melee (U), and Puyo Pop (U) do this.