Homebrew coders over at TehSkeen have manged the near-ultimate hacker achievement of enabling region-free gaming on the Wii via a software hack -- no mod chips or Freeloader disc required. Implementation of Gecko Region Free couldn't be simpler: you just load boot.elf from the chain loader, stick in your Wii game and hit reset. The hack claims to have borrowed zero code from Nintendo or Datel, making this pure homebrew. You'll still need to use that Twilight Princess hack to get thing started, and Nintendo could always rain on this parade, but for the time being the world (of foreign-released games) is your oyster.

[Via Wii Fanboy]

This one has been in the works for a while, but it looks like you can finally pick up your very own region-free enabler for the Wii for $19.99. Wii FreeLoader allows you to play any GameCube or Wii game from any region on your Wii. You just stick the FreeLoader disc into the console, let it spin up, eject the disc and stick in your title of choice -- like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, for instance, or some cooking-related title. Since there's no hardware modding required, this one theoretically won't void your warranty, but who's to say how Nintendo will treat you if you somehow break your Wii with it, and there's always the fear that Nintendo will hit your Wii with a mandatory software update that breaks FreeLoader, so proceed with caution. Or don't, so much confusing entertainment awaits you!

[Via Wii News]

We're not quite ready to believe these things function as advertised just yet, but it seems that multi-region Blu-ray players are beginning to pop up on a few overseas websites. We're seeing a region hacked Samsung BD-P1400 and Sony BDP-S300 / BDP-S500, each of which are reportedly modified to play nice with BD regions A / B as well as DVD regions 1 / 2. Aside from that, each player looks to be unchanged, but you better believe the convenience won't run you cheap. Over at Stegen Electronics, a multi-region BDP-S300 will demand €599 ($878), while the modded BDP-S500 rings up at €899 ($1,318), and until someone bites the bullet and confirms that these things actually do what they claim to, we'd recommend holding off.

[Via TheImportForums, thanks Frode A.]
Read - Stegen Electronics
Read - DVD Direct

After getting promised the beauties of region-free content by our American Nintendo PR peeps, our hopes have been shattered by Nintendo UK who has now gone on record denying the claims. They put it rather bluntly, stating: "We are region-locked," and that Nintendo America made a mistake by claiming otherwise. UK General Manager David Yarnton seems to think that Wii games and online content will be region-encoded, locking out European gamers from US and Japan titles, with the same being true in reverse. Seems to be a pretty major slip-up, though it's possible that since Nintendo America's Perrin Kaplan was only speaking of first-party titles for the Wii, Nintendo UK was merely trying to counteract the misquotes her statement had been getting. We'll be watching this one develop, but for now we're hoping the language barrier will be the only thing keeping us from a flashy first-party Wii cooking title.

UPDATE: Bad new, folks. Nintendo has finally clarified this whole rigmarole, and the Wii will indeed be region-locked for both first and third party titles and online content.

[Thanks, Timerider]

Read - IGN: Wii Titles Region-Encoded
Read - IGN: Wii Region-Free Says Nintendo VP
Read - GamesIndustry.biz: Wii is region-locked
Read - Joystiq: Wii is region-free / Wii is region-locked

As much as we would have loved to devote the entire day to Wii-related goings-on, we also had some other important business to attend to; and besides, there are several blogs out there that are much better at covering gaming minutiae than ourselves. Still, amongst all the hustle and bustle of product announcements, press conferences, and rumor mongering, there were a few tidbits of info that seemed to fall by the wayside, so we thought it was only right to wrap those up into one tidy, bite-size post. Perhaps the biggest "non-news" of the day, so to speak, is that Wii has lost the DVD playback functionality that had been promised in earlier-speced versions of the console -- and the reasoning behind it kind of makes sense, as one less feature supposedly brought down the price of the console, and everyone already has a DVD player to begin with. On a more positive note, we also learned that at least Nintendo-produced discs -- and perhaps third party titles as well -- will be region-free, meaning that if you live in the US but have a hankering for one of those crazy, nonsensical Japanese cooking / weight loss / "thinking" games, all ya gotta do is import. Wanna learn more? Keep on reading...