* Note that these countries sometimes have games made exclusively for them, usually in French (NTSC-C) and Spanish (NTSC-M) respectively, these games however will still work in the other countries of this region without any modifications or lockout disabling devices.Īs officially listed in the 3DS Region Settings, The U region works as the Americas/Asia region, specifically in these countries: Games of Japanese origin and systems are usually released here first. Note: These games will usually work perfectly on American consoles and vice versa without conversion issues using a lockout disabler due to both video formats being identical (NTSC). List of Video Game Regions NTSC Territories Japan (NTSC-J)
WHERE TO SEE WII U SERIAL NUMBER SOFTWARE
Handheld consoles are not dependent on the analogue TV standards' limitation (NTSC/PAL/SECAM), however, the 3DS system software is designed to ignore a game if it does not correspond to the same region as the console (with the Chinese iQue 3DS being a special exception). A region code disabler through the Homebrew Channel is available on the Wii for playing import games. Circumvention of these regional barriers was slightly easier due to devices such as the Action Replay and Freeloader which simply disabled the lockout on the GameCubes made importation favorable to some. For example, Japanese Famicom cartridges were much smaller and had fewer pins than American NES carts, though convertors were made, not to mention older NES carts with convertor boards in them were used to adapt games.ĭisc based media starting with the GameCube has been made with different region codes based on the country's video format and region, similar to DVD/Blu-Ray region codes. Older consoles which took cartridges simply had cartridges of different shapes.
These restrictions can be bypassed however with a variety of exploits, though at the user's own risk.
As with a large amount of commercial media, Nintendo games have different regional formats to discourage importing and to fit the corresponding region's video formats.