Delays: Nintendo, we have had ENOUGH.

Delays have been an issue since gaming begun. I am not here to talk about your average game delay where a game is taken back into development to be improved, I'm talking about regional delays, in which a game is released in one country and months later, released in the others. Just recently, you all would have been treated to the news that Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the most anticipated Wii game to date, was delayed from December 3rd 2007 to February 10th 2008. Nintendo claimed that the delay was so they could use the time to tighten up the game and make everything perfect. With that in mind, we were willing to forgive them. Just as 2008 began and you were all preparing your Wii consoles for the excessive beating you would be giving them while playing Brawl, Nintendo out of no where announced that the date has been pushed to March 9th. This caused a lot of anger amongst gamers who have been anxiously awaiting this game since it was revealed at E3 2006, little did they know that they weren't the worst off.

So what was it this time, do Nintendo need more to make the game perfect or add a new character? No, in fact the game is finished and due out in Japan in just 2 weeks. The reason for this delay is localization. Localization is the term used for when a game is translated and coded for the specified regions they are being shipped to. So being slapped with a March 9th release date must have been pretty hard to swallow, that's another four whole weeks you need to live before you can play the game. After March 9th is here, we can all jump for joy as we will finally have the game...... or will we? I'm afraid not, as the European and Australian consumers will not only not have the game, but they won't even have a solid release date.

Allow me to take us back to early 2007. Many of us had just received our beloved Wii consoles and were happily swinging away in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. As time went by, a new Mario game appeared on the horizon known as Super Paper Mario. Just a couple months after the Wii was released, Japanese and American gamers were having a jolly old time playing this game, probably one of the most decent games for the system since its launch. But after the game was released in the US, what was left for Europe and Australia? According to Nintendo Australia, there was a TBD release date next to this title. Months passed and still, we heard nothing. Will the game ever arrive or did Nintendo just forget about us? Finally, September arrived and we felt honored to be blessed with Super Paper Mario...... a game the rest of the world had been playing for 6 months before us. But whatever, we finally got the game and since it was only one major delay, we didn't think anything of it.

That's up until we learned of a glitch in the PAL version of the game. Yes, in the PAL version of Super Paper Mario, there is a glitch that causes the Wii console to freeze up when you talk to a character called Mimi before finding a key in some level. How is that for insult to injury, we wait patiently for a game to arrive and when it finally does arrive, it's blessed with a glitch that didn't exist in the US version? Nintendo did offer to replace the game discs, but this is still unacceptable. I won't be willing to put up with this if Brawl suffers a similar fate.

So after all this blabbing on I've done above, what exactly am I trying to say? That us European and Australian gamers are SICK of waiting for these games. In case Nintendo doesn't realize this, Europe and Australia are the two countries where Nintendo has struggled the most, especially in the Gamecube era. The reason for this is because people would rather go on eBay and buy an imported system so they could get all their games dirt cheap and could import them when they released overseas. The rest of us went and got our Wii's modded so we can play imported software. Nintendo quickly stopped us though by making a software update that disallowed us to use non-endorsed software with the Wii, for example the Datel Freeloader disc that disabled the Wii's region lock.

Might I also ask how many of you are familiar with games such as Zack and Wiki, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3, Donkey Kong Jet Race and so on? Did you know those four games have still yet to be released in Australia? Do you want to know why these games were delayed? Nintendo Australia claimed "there are to many games currently on the market, so we are pushing all these titles to 2008". Yes, there are too many games. Might I bring up that most of them are those Popcorn Arcade shovel ware titles with the $20 budgets that only kids would buy? Out of all the games that released at the end of 2007, the only ones that made their mark on the sales charts were Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy and Mario and Sonic Olympic Games. What about Nintendo America? They released them all before 2007 concluded, so why do you choose to make us wait? What also makes me really mad is that you actually said that you were trying to minimize the delay issue. So when do you plan on actually making this a reality, because the way I see it we won't be getting Brawl before May at the earliest.

We are NOT second class citizens, being forced to wait for games months after they have been completed and released in the other regions is simply asking to much for some of us. Think of this community for example. When Brawl comes out, the over excited members are going to be playing through the game and posting millions and millions of "OMG, I UNLOCKED DUKE NUKE'M" threads all over this site. We really don't want to know everything about the game before we play it. In fact forget the community, what about sites like youtube? People are going to be posting millions of videos of themselves doing fights as well as completing certain missions in the Subspace Emissary and of course, showing off unrevealed characters and levels. Is this the price us gamers have to pay because we chose to live in a PAL country?

If Brawl doesn't release in Australia before the end of June 2008, I'm selling my Wii and my games and importing them from now on. I am not putting up with this, so many games I am being forced to wait for and pay more for. Nintendo wonders why their sales are no where near as high as in other regions. Get it together Nintendo, or you will lose ANOTHER consumer.