Some common reasons for importing include: 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: Note: Pre-third generation consoles are not listed because at the time there was little to no importing and consequently there was little reason to introduce regional lock-out.
Sometime importing difficulties may still arise (e.g. Atari 2600 games from regions the console is not from may introduce some glitches, such as missing colors).
This, when combined with the Homebrew channel and a disk loader application, allows users to bypass region checks for Wii games.
[8] The Sega Saturn has a fairly unusual workaround; while a disk-based console, it has a cartridge slot generally used for backup memory, cheat cards, and other utilities.