N-Europe tells you how to get around Nintendo's country restrictions when giving Virtual Console gifts to foreign European countries...

Say, for example, you live in Spain. What happens if you want to send Pokémon Snap to a friend in Portugal? Or you live in France, and you want to send F-Zero to a mate in Finland?

At the moment, Nintendo's new service to send your Wii Friends VC titles as gifts is restricted to those in the country you currently live. Bah, humbug, we say. So here's how to get around said restriction.

• Go to the Settings option on your Wii. Select 'Country' and choose the name of the country you're sending your gift to.
• Go to the 'WiiConnect24' section and re-accept the terms and conditions here.
• Now connect to the Wii Shop Channel - you'll get a message saying country settings have changed, and you'll have to re-accept the terms and conditions here too.
• And that should be it. Get sending those presents!

Please Note: While your home country is changed to something else, you will not receive any pending gifts from within your home country. We advise you check you have none pending before, and return your country to its default setting afterwards. Additionally, changing your location disables parental control restrictions, which will need to be put back on.

This fix will only work for the country locations on your Wii (if you have a PAL Wii, this means just the countries that come under the PAL region, other European countries and Australia for example). A PAL Wii does not have the ability to change its location outside of the PAL region, to the USA or Japan for example.