Hey, all you fans of Japanese imports. Yeah, you — the guy (or girl!) who jams out to Taiko No Tatsujin on a regular basis and forked over a bundle to pre-order a copy of Rhythm Tengoku Gold. Guess what you won’t be able to do in future if you buy the soon-to-be-released Nintendo DSi software?
According to an announcement from Nintendo today, the DSi’s software will be region-locked for major territories, including North America, Japan and Europe. Nintendo’s reasoning, according to Eurogamer, was that “(the) DSi embeds net communication functionality within itself and we are intending to provide net services specifically tailored for each region.”
New parental controls are also in the works for each region, which would certainly mean the friend code system could be changing as well. It was never specifically mentioned, but we’ll have to see what happens.
Of course, if you have the current DS Lite, you can still go on enjoying your imports, but I can’t see a worse way to turn niche gamers off to Nintendo’s new version of the popular handheld. People that are uninterested in import games won’t care, but there are a lot of us who do care and would prefer to keep our good old DS Lite, thank you very much.
[Via GamePro — Thanks, Joe]
