While many games consoles do not allow games from other countries to be played on them (mainly due to voltage, localization and licensing issues), some consoles (often handheld, due to the universal nature of batteries) are not necessarily restricted to a certain locale. Some of these include:
- 3DO Interactive Multiplayer
- Game Boy and variant Game Boy Pocket
- Game Boy Color
- Game Boy Advance and variants Game Boy Advance SP, Game Boy Micro
- Game Gear
- Neo Geo
- Neo Geo Pocket
- Neo Geo Pocket Color
- Nintendo DS/Nintendo DS Lite
- PC Engine CD-ROM2/TurboGrafx CD
- PSP (*)
- PlayStation 3 (*)
(*) While the PlayStation Portable is hyped to be region-free, regional lockout do exists to some extent in the console, and it's up to the producer of the game to implement it. For example, some have reported that the PSP release of Battlezone in some countries are region-locked. Likewise, UMD movies are region-locked. The Playstation 3 also has an optional region-lock that the producer of the game can choose to or not to implement. It will also honor the region-coding of Blu-Ray movies, DVD movies, and PSOne and PS2 games.
While the 3DO does not feature regional lockout, a few Japanese 3DO games can only be played on a Japanese console due to special kanji data. (Likewise, games for the Chinese iQue DS do not run on non-Chinese Nintendo DS systems, whose firmware does not include the Chinese character font.) At the 3DO company's suggestion, the majority of game developers added these files to the game CDs so that they could be played on foreign consoles. Known titles that did not feature these data on the CDs include Sword & Sorcery and a demo version of Alone in the Dark.
The seventh generation consoles have complicated matters by largely leaving the region coding of games down to the individual developer. The Xbox 360 has many games that are not region coded (as did the original Xbox, albeit to a lesser extent) and both Sony and Nintendo have alluded to the fact that developers will have the option of making their games region-free.
NOTE:ALL THESE INFORMATIONS CAN BE ALSO GATHERED FROM THE LINK
http://www.answers.com/topic/import-gamers
