Playing International games with your wii

From OzModChips Wiki

Playing international Games on your wii is awesome. Lets face it, its the best reason to get your wii chipped.

However, there are some risks involved with playing international games on your console, please don't play them until you have read and fully understood this page.

[edit] Compatibility

Not every single game is compatible. The compatibility for NTSC-U (American) games to PAL console is at about 70%. A wiki list has been created to save you time and money.

Wii Cross Region Compatibility List

Games usually appear on this website the day they come out! You will notice that there are 2 columns. Some NTSC games want to be displayed in NTSC mode. You can change this BEFORE you get into a game. Go to wii settings --> screen type to change it.

[edit] Bricking your Wii

What is bricking? Bricking is when you render your console useless, a useless console is as good as a brick - and usually weighs about the same. You can hardware brick your wii, by stuffing up an installation. Or you can software brick your wii by messing with the wii's firmware. Your wii firmware can be found when you enter the wii settings. It is in the top right hand corner. It should say something like '2.2e'. If there is nothing there, then you are on the base firmware.

Some games force a firmware update. The game 'wants' to be played on the latest firmware. This can cause major problems! Lets give an example

• You are on your PAL console, with firmware 2.1e
• You insert a 'Super Paper Mario' disc you imported from the US
• The disc will not recognize until you click on the disc channel...
• When you click the disc channel a message will pop up saying something like 'updating wii console'
• There is no 'Ok or cancel' just ok.
• If you press Ok (please don't) then your wii will proceed to put NTSC settings on your PAL console.
• Apparently it doesn't matter if you are connected to the internet or not - it will still put the wrong settings on your console.
• All firmware revisions are builds ontop of the last...so its like your console will have PAL --> PAL --> PAL --> NTSC.
• Your wii will reset itself, and you will be presented with an opera error screen
• There is no hardware reset, so your wii is piece of metal, with no use
• The DVD drive which is modded is fine, but the actual console motherboard itself is stuffed
• There is NO way to recover from this currently.

[edit] How to not Brick your Wii

There are 3 ways to stop bricking your wii, starting from worst to best.

1. Just don't play international Games
2. Keep your Wii's firmware up to date all the time. Test it out before playing an international game. It only needs to be done once before playing a new unique game. If you have the latest firmware, the disc will still chuck some settings on your console, but these are harmless if you are up to date with firmware.
3. Use 'Wii Brick Blocker' (WBB). WBB is a bit of custom software a French programmer made to totally remove an update from a disc. You see, these games actually don't need these updates, they are just nice to haves. You can download WBB and run it on an ISO image that you have before you burn it. It only takes about 30 seconds to work its magic.

Official Wii Brick Blocker Website

Wii Brick Blocker 1.3 We have mirrored the download