meppi64

Voted Recca even though I have the Famicom cart as well and I'll be picking up Star Soldier and Ducktales too. Great shoot em up week this time!

Oh, gonna buy quite a few games this week!
Donkey Kong, Kid Icarus, Metroid, Kokuga and Mario and Luigi 4. Great way to start of my vacation!

His reasoning is understandable, yet when someone imports a game from another region, Iwata shouldn't feel like it's his responsibility to make sure that software is cultural acceptable or has legal restrictions in the region where the publisher isn't selling the actual software.
Clearly when a consumer is willing to go through the trouble of buying items from different locations through importers, they are fully aware that those games might be created with a certain local flavour.
Like I said, I understand where Iwata is coming from, but he shouldn't feel the need to protect a very small portion of consumers from themselves.
In the end we will find a way to play region specific games.
Heck Sayonara Umihara Kawase came in the mail today and I've yet to buy a Japanese 3DS.... Which I will if I have to, but I certainly don't want to since I already have a perfectly fine EU XL. :-/

@Araknie
Whenever you need to use a 3rd party device to play imports, it actually violates the TOS of the system and ends up voiding your warranty if anything goes wrong. That alone should be enough to make you understand that the system, no matter how easy to crack, wasn't made to play imports originally.

If you want me to go into details, fine.
Taking this article as an attack on Nintendo is misguided as best and even ignorant. Why should we have to protect Nintendo instead of raising valid questions. Nintendo have been locking down their systems ever since the Famicom, either by software or hardware lockouts. Yet the Game Boy, GBA, Virtual Boy and DS all were region free. It was only on certain DS games that had DSi only features that they started locking down region free play. And afterwards they did the same with th 3DS on a system level.
It is a restriction that when lifted, would not hurt them in any meaningful way since a game sold in one territory, is still a game that they got their money from.

Siting a handful of games that get released in a timely manner across the world doesn't make a good argument either. For every one you list, there are tens of games that we'll have to wait months if not years for. And no, not every single one is an RPGS that needs months of translation work to be adapted to differ markets.

I love Nintendo and have done so ever since I played the original Donkey Kong in the arcade back in the day. But this "leave Nintendo alone" argument doesn't make any sense at all. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. And the only way to make them understand that there is a problem with some of their policies is to talk about them and bring them to their attention like the original article does.

@Araknie
My head hurts from reading that post... :-/
So much wrong with it, I don't even know where to begin. Even the first sentence makes no sense.
"Sony was always region free".... yeah, no. The first Sony system that was region free was the PS3. Heck, even playing foreign games on a Vita is a hassle due to the way the account system works with the memory cards.

@Rod64
That's like saying "others shouldn't care about region locking because it's no good for me", which is completely silly.
Captain Rainbow is a silly example. Of course people who don't know any Japanese won't be buying adventure games with lots of text or RPGs.
It doesn't make any sense for them to do so.
But there are plenty of genres that require little to no knowledge of the language to be enjoyable. And even then, learning a few basic words in Katakana just to be able to understand some menus, or even Hiragana isn't very hard.
Heck, nowadays you can even get an app on your phone to help you learn the most basic words and sentences in a matter of days/weeks.
It reminds me about the people that kept whining about us asking to finally be able to play 60Hz games.
Even if it doesn't benefit you personally, why bother speaking against it?
Many other would enjoy region free systems immensely so why lock it down because the majority doesn't care or can't be bothered with it. It doesn't take away any features from anyone, so I see no reason whatsoever to be against something like this. Just like I don't see no reason to not have voted for the non-DRM version of the Xbox One, even though I have no intent to buy the system myself.

This is something I can 100% support.
Nintendo seems to be scared of people buying cheaper games from differ regions, but I feel they are misunderstanding a large part of import gamers.
I never buy an import game or system because it's cheaper, heck most of the time it costs me nearly double or more than a regular PAL release. I've been buying them ever since the Saturn days and will continue to do so for the simple reason that we always miss out on so many games, no matter how good the intentions of publishers might be. Some titles just aren't viable to release in certain markets.
But by giving people such as myself the option to buy and play them, they actually end up selling a bit more in the end.
It's the reason why I have 3 360s right now and multiple versions of just about any retro system you can think of.
It is also the reason why I had to resort to modding my Wii.
While the thought of running emulators or pirated games on it never even crossed my mind, I modded it so I could finally play ExciteBots s well as Reginleiv. Two of my favourite games on the system now.
I even ordered Sayonara Umihara Kawase on 3DS yesterday, even though I don't have a 3DS system that is able to run it yet....

So yes, please mister Shibata, if you read this. Try to look at it from this point of view for a change.
I would rather buy several more import titles with the same money that I'll be using to shell out for an import Wii U and 3DS which will be marked up severely by exporters and import shops alike.

One of the reasons I love this company so much!

Pac-Man Battle Royale? Wow. I never thought we'd see a home port. This game is so much fun!

It's all good and well, but I prefer the more arcade style approach to game development compared to the play it one time and be done with it cinematic approach. Sure those games are nice too, but they are created to be consumed and put away most of the time.

It's a little early for that, but I'm not gonna argue against it.
If the system can keep up the releases like this it'll sure end up somewhere around the top.

oooh When they first started doing classic 3D remakes, this was one of the games I hoped would be coming out eventually.
The parallax scolling in the Sonic games has always been brilliant so it'll look amazing with a depth capable screen.

Well I'm not enamoured with the result of FB2 on PS3 or 360 either.
But that has more to do with DICE's incompetence than anything else.

As someone who loved this game when it was first released back in the day in the arcades and played it constantly, this review kinda stings.

Haha, I just bought all of the Zen Pinball tables on the Wii U, except for the Marvel stuff listed.
Looks like I'll be getting all of these at the end of the week as well.

I'd really like to see what the Japanese line was in this particular case.
And I certainly agree. It feels a bit like the old Working Design translations where they try way too hard to make every other line an in-joke.
Certainly not to the same extend, but a bit embarrassing nonetheless.

@ThomasBW84
Oh no, I wasn't talking about you! You certainly misunderstood what I wrote.

8-4 Play are the guys that translated the game to English. (edit, well the US version anyway) That's why I said that sometimes they just try too hard to be funny. It had nothing to do with this news item.

Sometimes the 8-4 guys try just a little too hard...

Time to sell my boxed copy on ebay?
nah...

Not sure if it's too much to ask, but I would find it rather helpful if news items like these got bumped up when we the eshop update actually goes live and we can buy the games. Right now it's Monday evening and it's already about to be bumped off the front page. The past couple of weeks I had to go look for these updates in between all old news since they were posted so early.
Don't misunderstand, I love the heads up, but it doesn't do much good when the sale is still 3 days away.

Oooh, great price for Virtue's Last Reward. I'll be certain to grab it alongside Fire Emblem! Now I still need to hunt down a copy of 999 to play first though...

The sooner these games are going to come to the Wii U VC in 60Hz, the sooner I'll be grabbing all NeoGeo games even though I have a lot of them on my AES.

My God! I was planning on picking up a Japanese LL just for this game when it released in Japan! Looks like I won't have to for now.

Happy anniversary guys!
NL is one of the few sites I visit on a daily basis. Keep up the great work!

I seem to have overdosed on the eshop yesterday, so I will have my weekend booked full. And then some.
Still playing lots of Monster Hunter on 3DS and that will only increase when the Wii U version finally arrives here.
Then I picked up Luigi's Mansion 2, Code of Princess, escapeVector, RE Mercenaries and the Fire Emblem demo.
And today Devil Survivor Overclocked also arrived!

@TwilightV

Haha, I had no idea!
I find it so strange how they seemingly missed this, especially as the game was created in Europe.

But is the most important part fixed?
Does the announcer say Mega Drive Mod in Europe instead of Genesis Mod?!

Oh wow. This reminds me of Amidar and Crush Roller!
It's been a very long time since I played a game like this. Certainly gonna be picking it up tomorrow from the eshop along with Luigi's Mansion and Code of Princess.

@SilentHunter382
It's not just that, it's the way he acted when talking about those problems.
Not to mention how jealous he seemed towards Notch when Minecraft did so well and got major support from Microsoft. If he had played his cards right and actually talked to them about the issues, he probably would have gotten a similar deal. But instead he started badmouthing everyone involved, so I find it hard to feel any sympathy for him.

It doesn't even matter to me. After the disgusting way he acted about not patching the XBLA version, he's not getting a cent from me ever again. Doesn't help that he comes of as a douche most of the time either.

Oh my! I have the Sega Saturn version and it's brilliant. This will be even better without the load times.

@xj0462

Look at the system itself. It says Mega Drive!

Oh, I spot a Japanese Bloodlines in there as well!
That's one of the games that I'm still really after at this point. Will certainly be grabbing it in the future when I feel like spending some coin.

and extra props for Wardner no Mori!

I love Super Meat Boy, but I can't see the character working in SSB, it just doesn't fit. At all.
Not wanting to take away from the developers, but I would hate seeing SSB being transformed into a Sony Allstar lookalike with tons of mismatched characters that don't have enough charm to have people care about them.

I couldn't help but smile as I read that last line.

I don't think I could disagree with him even more if I tried...

Still my favourite DS, even though I have every iteration.
Also just bought a second 3DS XL and chose the white one as it reminds me a lot of the DSL. Fantastic system all around.

No worries. I don't want to turn this whole thing into a complainfest.
Just trying to explain I'm not talking bout smoothness or speed either. The game graphics weren't better on pal systems because they used the exact same resolution as NTSC games despite the TV sets themselves having 100 lines more in Europe as those weren't even used. The game screen looked squeezed together since the lines are closer together in pal sets compared to an NTSC set of the same size.

As for most people not knowing any better, I have to admit, you have about 5 years on me. But you should remember how some of the most respected magazines at the time stated the problems with pal conversion in many an article.
Heck even some of the most beloved UK magazines at the time were deep, and I mean very deep into the import scene and even gave gamers lots of info on how they could be playing import games. Even the one French magazine I used to buy in the day was huge into import games and helping people make the jump.
So I think you underestimate the number of people that went through the trouble of importing for this very reason, or at least knew about it back in the day.

Perhaps it's just me misreading the article, but I didn't read the section talking about pal being superior in the same fashion you did.
On the pal standard itself being superior to NTSC in regards to resolution, no one can deny that 100 extra horizontal lines is a bad thing.
But then again, up until the 32-bit days and even through most of that generation, nearly all games not created by European software developers didn't take advantage of this superior standard. Instead they took the games made for NTSC sets and directly ported them to pal compatible systems, which resulted in the black borders.

So yes, the pal standard itself is superior on paper just like the article states, yet when it comes to actual games which in the end is what we are talking about, nearly no one played to it strengths and thus certainly didn't create a superior product When putting out their pal versions.

Good link there, Sun.
Hope that explains this whole mess a little better.
And importing PAL games to the US to get higher resolution graphics wouldn't do much good without an actual PAL tv either. If those games actually took advantage of the extra lines that is.

@TheRealThanos

Let's not start with name-calling, that won't help anyone.
The article does mention that the PAL standard had the superior picture at the time and that is indeed correct, but it doesn't transfer over into games since they didn't use the extra vertical resolution at all. Instead they simply took the original resolution of the games and filled up the extra lines on PAL tv's with black (or coloured) bars depending on the system. So you didn't have gain any of the advantages, it only made it so the lines of pixels shown were placed tighter together. Couple this with the slower refresh rate, it certainly is in no way superior to NTSC when it comes to playing games.
And yes, I do have tons and tons of original games for all the classic systems as well, yet I've been buying large amounts of Japanese imports for 8,16 and 32-bit systems in the past 15 years as well since once you do realise there it a difference, it's very hard to go back to the neutered versions.

People asking for the "authentic" 50Hz version sound a bit like people who used to watch letter-boxed movies on their 4:3 tv back in the 80's and 90's and refuse to watch anything in their original cinema format on Bluray these days as they long for the "authentic home movie experience" of days gone by.
It just doesn't make any sense at all.
We got the short end of the stick for over 2 decades. Nintendo is taking the first big step to finally rectify this situation and bring us up to par with everyone else in the world who has been able to enjoy these games with their true original vision intact, and still we get people saying: "no thanks, I want the low budget, inferior, hack job of a port instead". SMH

@Five-seveN

Only 4, but they all handle very differently.
My personal favourite is the Pink Stingray.

Now seriously. if this means that all future VC games will run in 60Hz instead of 50Hz, I'll buy a lot more games from the store instead of importing 2nd hand Japanese copies of games for these classic systems.

Thank you Saturo Shibata!
I know you are reading this.

I sure hope not. This new castlevania game is the first portable one I will not be buying. Don't want these guys anywhere near Zelda...

@TheGodzillaFan
Nice find!

I'm not concerned with what Kotick thinks anyway. After he destroyed Bizarre Creations I stopped buying anything that has an Activision logo on it. Works for me.

Mine just arrived in Belgium. Very nice quality.

Great news as I just got my second SNES classic controller from Club Nintendo in yesterday.

As long as they never touch Metroid again, I'll be happy.