Remember Aaron Davies, the Wii fan who made it his mission to find out why Nintendo first-party releases were always delayed in Australia and New Zealand ?

Aaron produced a convincing report detailing the significant lag times between the Australian and North American release dates. After discussions with Nintendo, he was asked to submit questions for Nintendo Australia to address. You can see his questions relating to localization, release delays and region locking on his site. And the response from Nintendo, after requesting said questions ?

“Nintendo Australia has no comment; Nintendo Australia does not comment on these issues.“

Beyond lame, refusing to comment is just insulting to their customers.

<rant>

Nintendo, we love your product, but don’t treat your customers with such disrespect.

While I’m drawing a long bow (maybe a long crossbow ?) here, I think the slow releases will probably drive some hardcore Wii fans to piracy.

Nintendo, if you are going to region lock your console, at least don’t give your customers a good reason to bypass that locking with a modchip, just so they can import games and avoid waiting months for a local release. Essentially, your slow release cycle is going to drive more Wii owners to install modchips to gain access to new release import games … and hell, once the thing is modded why not copy a few games as well ?

</rant>

I encourage everyone to Digg Aarons latest effort … I think Nintendo Australia believe that giving “no comment” will just make the issue go away. Let’s make sure this doesn’t just disappear, and see how they respond.