The most beloved piece of pirate treasure in Japan these days is the Chinese-made Nintendo DS piracy device called the R4. [looks around innocently] Never heard of it.
According to The Times Online, the device is taking Tokyo's geek haven Akihabara by storm, and retailers say that sales are "very strong." Storefronts advertise the item, but won't say exactly what the item does.
“New R4 shipment has finally arrived! You know what it does! Absolutely no questions will be answered concerning this product . . .” reads the sign outside one electronics store just off the main Akihabara drag. “Guaranteed for one week only! Of course we can’t explain what the R4 will do . . .” reads another in the store next door.
The R4 permits the downloading and usage of illegally-copied DS games on the portable console, and games are readily available on the internet. Of course, any well-rounded gamer knows how this device and others like it work, but I'm sure that Nintendo is not loving the attention that the article has called to this piracy device for the rest of the world.
As an experiment The Times obtained an R4 chip and downloaded free of charge on the internet ten new Nintendo DS games – worth about £400. The games, one of which had gone on sale only the day before, worked perfectly. The entire process took less than half an hour.
It seems that Nintendo knows what is going on. “We are keeping a close eye on the products and studying them. But we cannot smash all of them,” a Nintendo spokesman said.
Dale North is Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief, a founding editor, and specialist in Japanese gaming. An accomplished musician, Dale was reporting from Japan during the earthquakes of 2011. Luckily, he got the fuck out alive and is home in America now with his wife and beloved corgi, Einstein. Dale is also a co-founder of Destructoid's sister anime site
Japanator. Likes Corgis, Sega Saturn, PSP, iPhone, Photographic tools.
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Contest:
9:47 AM on 11.26.2007
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Anyway, as little as I know about the legalities of such matters(although, I'm not sure anyone knows much more for sure), the don't seem to be doing anything illegal. Downloading carts you don't own probably is, but I can't see how providing the means to do so, as a side effect of a perfectly legal homebrew platform, infringes on any of nintendo's shit.
Sure this sux for 3rd party developers, or at least the ones that pay a team of intelligent people to create a real game. But feeling bad for Nintendo while they are raking in the dough and charging $5 for NES games is not something I can do. IMO it's there responsibility to stop us from pirating because assuming that we would rather pay for something rather then get it for free is just off base and crazy.
P.S. I don't own an R4.....yet
Nintendo SMASH!
What's strange is that Nintendo has an ugly history of sending a cease and desist to anybody that sneezes, so I have a hard time watching them knowingly let this slip. Fasten your tin foil hats boys, they are letting this ride to sell the old DS hardware off the shelves before they introduce their new handheld console.
Hell yes, I'm betting we hear about the new handheld within a year. And you'd better believe there will be firmware updates this time.
I don't know where you're looking, but there are a handful of sites that have them readily available for purchase. But maybe the situation has changed since last summer when I...I mean a friend purchased an R4 + 1gb Kingston Micro SD card for just over $40.
Also, Nintendo can't do crap about the R4. It's not as easy as just patching the DS so it doesn't recognize the software. They took out Datel's Freeloader and Action-Replay recognition from the Wii with trickery, and got me pretty pissed off while they were at it. Thinking about it just makes me want to rip Nintendo off a fraction of a percent of the gajillions of dollars they're making. ;[
I honestly want an R4 just to load all the games I own onto it, so I don't have to carry a tin around with me all the time. I wouldn't mind getting to play my SCUMM CD-rom games on the go either. Not a fan of piracy myself, it just serves to fuck over gamers in the long run.
If you don't drop the prices of games occasionally, you lose sales to this shit.
Peddling the "legitimate backups" excuse doesn't carry water anymore guys. With the DMCA in place, just extracting a digital copy of the game from the cartridge is illegal. Owning a backup is illegal in itself. It doesn't matter if you do it for any reason you give.
That said, my R4 should be here next week.
I bet its only a matter of time before Nintendo do release that second DS update that we've heard whispers about. If that does come out, it will have onboard memory, which will at last see us downloading and storing demos or full games onto the DS itself (this would make perfect sense for WVC games too). Another DS would also make sense to nip gadgets like R4 in the bud, with similar updates like PSP to lock them out.
To put it more simply though, if Nintendo got their act together and offered more consistent DS demos (official and import), more people would surely buy more games.
We'll see how much Nintendo care about giving us a better deal soon enough (like DS and Wii hard drives). For hard drives, via updates, are the key to solving such piracy problems. Take a hint out of Sony and MS's books here, Nintendo.
I makes life with the DS so much more fun. Hell it even got me to go out and buy another DS for my gf, so SHE would be able to have one.
It only cost me 80 bucks, thats including the r4 chip, a 2gig micro sd card, and priority shipping.
www.realhotstuff.com
I know it sounds like a porno site lol but theyre based out of NJ which is a hell of a lot better then ordering from out of the country. And damn it took 2 days to get to my house!
You are right about the DMCA thing. Let's all hope that they get around to passing it's revised version so we can all you know, own the stuff we pay for again.
iedge