14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Mexico has problems with counterfeit games and other Nintendo products, since the local authorities have taken measures to stop the phenomenon. They have just seized 15.000 of these counterfeit items and you might want to know that 4.500 of them were Wii game discs.
According to Jodi Daugherty, senior director of anti-piracy at Nintendo of America "Mexico is Nintendo's largest market in Latin America, where the problem of video game piracy is widespread." The authorities are not alone in this battle against piracy, as Nintendo also provides help and they've counted 100.000 counterfeit Wii games confiscated this year.
Such products are usually found at customs, because thousand of counterfeit games are shipped each month, coming straight from China. In San Juan de Dios, in Guadalajara, 23 stores had to be closed and the police confiscated 56.000 counterfeit Nintendo products.
The fake Wii discs have a couple of funny features, like the fact that the good old Mario has been renamed "Senor El Jumpo" and he wears a sombrero. This is not the only modification, as the hit title Cooking Mama, only features recipes for burritos in its Mexican counterfeit version. We're puzzled to see this happening and the number of fake discs is huge, but we can't help to laugh at the funny name chosen for Mario during the counterfeiting process.
Will piracy ever be stopped? The best-selling consoles surely suffer from this "plague", specially a cheap one like the Nintendo Wii, more accessible to the type of gamers that would rather buy counterfeit discs instead of original games. Imagine what these numbers look like in the case of the DS, the GBA, the PS2 or the PSP... Also we wonder why do these things happen in the era of downloads? Is it that difficult for local pirates to make their own Wii discs? At least that's helping the police find the counterfeit products faster....