Nintendo Wii Not Be Region-Locked

This is an excerpt of an article where they states that the but the hardware will not support a different TV format:

I have just checked with Nintendo’s customer support whether the Wii is, in fact, region locked or not. The Nintendo support team sent the following reply:

The Wii will not play games from Japan or America as their TV system, NTSC, is not compatible with ours. This has always been the case with Nintendo consoles and has nothing to do the accepted term of ‘Region Locking’.

This sounded promising, but I decided to ask them to clarify:

So besides the TV standard, the consoles are compatible?

What if I do not hook the Wii console up to a non-TV screen, for example to a computer’s LCD screen? Mine has composite and svideo-in. Or does this actually depend on differences in the hardware and/or software? I surely would hope this is not the case.

The Nintendo Wii Support team promptly replied to this:

The Wii will be built to play the games from the area which it will be used in. So a UK Wii will only play European games oh and Australian games as they are on PAL as well. The USA Wii will play their games and Japanese games as they are NTSC.

So it’s the official answer: Wii is not region locked, but the hardware will not support a different TV format. They did evade my question whether or not output to a non-tv would make any difference, but I seriously doubt this is the case.

Full Article

Man that sucks… I was really looking forward to The Bigs, it would awesome to play Baseball online with the Wii controller but I dount it’ll be released in the UK due to near to zero interest in Baseball.

hey i am really annoyed! you deleted my comment because you couldn’t face what i had said you know i was right so. you are cowards! if you are reading this the Wii is region locked it’s just the context that this is in, makes it sound like it will not be region locked. So once again i ask you to delete this storie/post, not my comment the post!

i didnt deleted your comment, the spam filter deleted it.