I only found out the Wii was (might be) region-locked after carting all my Wii stuff from NZ to the UK. A rather depressing thought — I’d have to export any new games I wanted from back home.
I contacted Nintendo UK to find out for sure, and they confirmed, yes it was region locked… but then went on to describe the region locking as though it was tied to the TV colour encoding system. They continued, “For example, the UK uses PAL-a, and New Zealand uses PAL-b which should be compatible”.
I’m guessing the question was completely misunderstood.
Anyway, rather then destroying any chance of becoming carbon-neutral this century, I thought it was worth buying a local game and trying it out. Zack & Wiki duly arrived from Amazon, and was inserted, with some trepidation, into the console… and worked perfectly.
Conclusion: if the Wii region encoding is controllable by the publisher, as some have reported (see the comments of that page), then Capcom, at least, have not exercised that control. Well done Capcom, and… awesome game, by the way.
Sounds like the Gamecube region control. I bought a few games from the UK but Japan and the US were out of bounds unless you had a Freeloader disk which allowed NTSC games to run on PAL cubes
That explains it then. Thanks. It’s a relief to know the next spin of the Wii revolver won’t splatter broken game bits over my tv…
There should be no compatibility probs between Pal and Pal-b. Instead of scart, use a 3 point coax input instead.