# I wanted to play Wii Party

12 Dec. 2022, 8:30 PM

The other day, I was recommended a video of a speedrun for a Wii game I had never heard of: Wii Party. From what I could tell, it was like Mario Party, but you played using Miis. I’ve never been a fan of Mario Party except for the mini games, but I thought it looked kind of fun. Then I heard the announcer’s voice.

I was amazed they made a game with an announcer with this entertaining of a voice. Mario Party 8 had Ballyhoo as its announcer character, and he has a funny voice, but I just found him really annoying. Party Phil has a great voice. He just sounds like the weirdest little guy but you’re totally rooting for him. At that point, I made my mind up. I wanted to play Wii Party.

I looked for used copies on eBay, and it looked like the going price for a used copy was around $40. I’m a cheap gamer, so I didn’t want to pay that much. Luckily for me (or so I thought), the Japanese version only cost $15, shipping included.

A few days after ordering, I remembered some things I had read about other Nintendo systems, namely that they were region-locked. If you aren’t familiar, that just means there is software that prevents you from playing games sold in one region (such as Japan) on consoles sold in another region (such as North America). I vaguely started to dread that this might be the case with the game I had just ordered, but I didn’t bother to do any futher research. I figured I would find out when the game arrived.

Well, the game arrived today. I stuck it in the Wii, and lo and behold, it says it can’t read the disc. I mean, I know it could read the disc, it just refuses to because it’s marked as coming from Japan.

There are ways to install modded software on your Wii so it can bypass region locking. That kind of sounds like a hassle, and I wouldn’t want to mess something up & brick our old beloved console. I think I’ll look into using an emulator like Dolphin and see if that can run it. I still haven’t given up on my dream of partying with Phil just yet.

Have you ever gotten burned by region-locking? Do you know of any other ways around it? Have you played Wii Party? Do you find Party Phil’s voice as hilarious as I do? Let me know at my Ctrl-C email: `gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club`.