Mar 14 2008
Datel’s Wii Freeloader works. Imported Wii games a reality!
Tired of Nintendo’s frustrating European release dates? Then be despair no longer! Announced on the codejunkies website towards the end of February, the Wii Freeloader is only now starting to get into the hands of gamers. Posts on message boards over the last couple of days have confirmed that the product works fine with USA copies of Super Smash Bros Brawl. The only issues appear to be with RGB output on some tv’s, although this is resolved by using alternate video output methods such as s-video. A lot of online retailers do not have stock of the product, most likely due to large orders in recent days once the news broke of successful use. Retailers claiming to have stock are dvd.co.uk, 365 games £39.99 bundle with USA copy of smash bros and various private ebay sellers although not really a preffered route as people may try to be pass off the old gamecube version as “works on wii”, which it technically does but only for Gamecube games. Click continue reading for more for more info. You know you want to!
Personally I’ve gone for the 365games route as stock of the USA Smash Bros Brawl is in this country right now and there won’t be any nasty import tax surprises when it gets delivered. Confirmation of the products success will be bad news for British retailers while Specialists USA exporters can expect a boom in business from the UK. One other possible outcome is that if importing does start to have a big effect on European sales, Nintendo would have pressure put on them by retailers to act. Hopefully the action would be to sort out their release schedule as opposed to just putting out a firmware update to break the Freeloader. This would have limited success anyway as the instruction for the product already give advice that firmware updates should not be accepted and to stick at today’s version.
A specialist USA games exporter I would recommend trying once you get your freeloader is the Canadian site videogamesplus.ca (most Wii games £24.99 + £3.50 delivery to UK).
We’ve been testing some of our GameCube games using Freeloader with variable results. I posted the results on our site.
So it’s not all good news.
From what i understand Datel have said the product is designed for Wii games and so there will be issues with gamecube games. Having said that I doubt EVERY Wii game will work either. Won’t see me waiting for UK releases anymore though, i’ll take the gamble on them working and hope for the best!
Do people still play on their wii now?
Wonder what the percetage of Wii’s being sold second hand is.