14 DAY TRIAL // One of the oldest and most frustrating problems for a gamer is that of availability. There are plenty of games that are not available at the same time on all markets. Sometimes, the USA gets the game a few days before Europe. Europe rarely gets a game while American gaming fingers stand idle. There are plenty of games that are exclusive to the Japanese market and that never or rarely get translations for other regions.
The development of the gaming consoles have, in a sense, made matters worse. Games are now region coded and, frequently, there are differences within the game for different regions. A recent example is No More Heroes, released for the Nintendo Wii, a game that features copious amounts of blood in the North American release. Japanese and European players have complained about the fact that characters don't spew off blood when they die but rather coins in their versions.
Well, these kinds of troubles are over for the users of the Nintedo Wii. Codejunkies have recently released the Wii Freeloader, a tool which allows gamers to play games from any regions on their local Wii consoles. The main attraction is that Freeloader does not require any tinckering with the console itself. You just pop in the Freeloader disk, follow instructions, remove the disks, pop in the disk of you're favorite out-of-region game and Wii away. No warranties are negated and the Wii itself is not modified. Yet, games that were previously unplayable are now accessible.
Such a product could prove to be a nice way to pressure game releases for the Wii to feature the same content regardless of the region they are released in. And, in the meantime, the Freeloader software allows users to actively circumvent any region restriction imposed on their favorite games.
The Wii Freeloader is available via the Codejunkies website. There's no official response from Nintendo yet.