14 DAY TRIAL // Disappointingly, but not entirely surprising given Nintendo's history, the upcoming New Nintendo 3DS and New 3DS XL models will be region-locked.
In spite of the outcry from the community, the Japanese corporation has decided to maintain its policy of strict region-locking for its devices, allowing devices from Japan, US or Europe to only play games form the same region they come from.
The recent announcement of the new models offered many fans a slight hope that the long-running community campaign and past backlash against Nintendo's decision to maintain its locking policy would result in the company releasing region-free SKUs, but to no avail.
In the meantime, Nintendo has confirmed the presence of region-locking restrictions on the new consoles to Gamespot, once again showing that voting with your wallet is the only way to force a big company to change its policy.
Nintendo's home consoles have always been bundled with some form of restriction pertaining to region, but the firm's older handhelds were region-free up to a certain point. The Nintendo DSi was the first portable to come with regional restrictions, which meant that DSi games and apps only worked in the territory they were released.
Fans even created an online petition asking Nintendo to make the Wii, Wii U and 3DS consoles region-free, sitting at around 32k signatures so far. Region-locking isn't that big of a deal for many of the Big N's fans, but it prevents fans of Japanese video games from playing them if they're not also released in North America or Europe.
Nintendo has claimed that the devices are region-locked in order to provide different parental control settings, to deal with the possibly different ratings in each territory, stating that it comes out of the need to adhere to legal restrictions in different countries.
In the meanwhile, Sony's PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita are region-free, but the region-locking functionality was embedded on the PlayStation 3 (as was on the Xbox 360), with games, however, rarely making use of it.
Nintendo's new systems, the upgraded versions of its Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo 3DS XL, simply referred to as the "new 3DS" and "new 3DS XL," are coming to Japan by the end of the year, and are headed to North America and Europe sometime in 2015.
The new devices come with a range of new features, such as faster CPU, dual analog sticks, face tracking for improved 3D imaging (not requiring you to hold the device at a certain angle), as well as built-in NFC support, which comes in handy for games that employ physical artifacts, using the Amiibo platform.