Happy Friday. Oh, and...

[Git Force Gemini]

Sin and Punishment confirmed for Virtual Console.

[miffy495]

Ah yes, but in which regions?

If this comes to North America I'll be pretty pumped. I'll wait for that news before getting too excited though. Still, awesome.

[Roderick]

What is it? I've heard about it, but not more than that.

(And when is Chrono Trigger coming to Europe )

[miffy495]

It's a kickass rail shooter from Treasure (Gunstar, Ikaruga, Astroboy, etc) for the N64. Never came out outside of Japan though.

hmmm... Now that I think about it, has anyone figured out a workaround for the Wii like the things that let you download Xbox live and Sony Online games from other regions?

[Aussie Ben]

Yes. I live in Australia (WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED) and we don't get TurboGrafx games listed. So, switch the region on my console to United Kingdom and I can buy Bomberman '93 and Bonk to my heart's content. And if I switch the region back to Australia, it all still works fine and displays the games as channels.

[Roderick]

You can do that easily? The switcheroo I mean.

[miffy495]

That's still within their PAL restrictions though, isn't it? Although I guess both North America and Japan are NTSC. Well, NTSC-U/C and NTSC-J, is that close enough? Essentially, is there a universal workaround, or just the Au-Eu one?

[Aussie Ben]

Haven't tried US switch, buuuuuut... I think the Japanese one is region locked. Because I remember hearing something about having to purchase Japanese Wii Points to get Japanese games. If you try to use a points card from elsewhere, you'll get "This code is from the wrong region" or something. Booooo.

Oh wait, I don't think there even IS an option for US on my PAL console, let me just check... nope, there's no option to switch the country of origin to Japan or US. But that was to be expected, really.

[Git Force Gemini]

There's an upcoming gizmo to make Wii games region-free. Whether this'll affect the VC is something only prayer can answer.

[miffy495]

I heard the Action Replay for the GCN works fine for those games. Still, I believe that's something that is booted on CD, and thus probably wouldn't work for VC stuff.

[Git Force Gemini]

The whole thing is mutton dressed as lamb so far. It's offering overpriced nostalgia-o-rama instead of letting me play the gems denied the first time round. Mother, S+P and loads of others that I can't remember just now...

[miffy495]

Well, I'm glad that they've put out Military Madness, Gunstar Heroes, and Ecco the Dolphin at any rate. I never had the systems that those were released on, so they're ones that I've wanted to check out for a while. Gunstar in particular, as I only learned about Treasure two years ago and have been trying to catch up on their back catalogue since.

[Roderick]

The current versions of Freeloader (i.e. the Gamecube ones) work on the Wii, but only for GC games. An upcoming Freeloader has already been confirmed that will also handle Wii games. I wish they'd just cut the crap with region locking though. It's only a few percentages of the entire audience that they're hurting with this, so why bother? It's not like they'll lose whole markets. And it's working ab-so-lutely fine for the handhelds, so why the conservatism, oh consolemanufacturers of the world?