There may be some exceptions, but first party titles look to be non-region coded. It's the shock of the day.

In a move that is sure to delight Nintendo fans, it appears that a proportion of games on the Wii will be region-free (i.e. there's no waiting for NOE to get their act together, simply get an import copy). In an interview with Wired this morning, Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan was asked if the Wii will be region-free, like the DS. The answer?

Yes. Like the Nintendo DS, the Wii will be able to play games from other regions, such as Japan, without any restriction. Kaplan implied there might be a region lock that publishers would be able to flip on, but it doesn't sound like the first-party titles from Nintendo will be restricted.

Further time will tell how publishers will react to the option of region-free, but we hope many will see the sense in it. Equally, the prospect of getting first-party titles from anywhere in the world is pretty fantastic - expect some confirmations soon on all this.

In the same interview, Kaplin confirmed that for the meantime the Wii's storage would be based on flash memory, with no apparent hard drive plans, and that games downloaded from the Virtual Console will be tied to a user account (like Xbox Live), so if your console breaks, for example, you can re-download with paying again. More as we get it.

Update: And now for some news thats completely different. David Yarnton, Nintendo UK's general manager said to IGN today at the Wii press event in London that the Wii games and online content will be region-encoded. We realise this is completely contradictory to Kaplan's previous comments, and are currently seeking confirmation from Nintendo one way or the other.

Thanks to R-E reader Mark for sending us the info for the update!