GTrusted

While some cities in Australia like Perth and Melbourne have had the Nintendo Switch readily available to consumers for a while, when we visited a Target store in San Ramon, California it was still sold out with the store only get a couple new units a week. It's odd to see an electronics product be out of stock for over six months since its initial release. Still, this Target had a nice video display demonstrating the Nintendo Switch.

Fortunately, even though the Nintendo Switch was not available, a selection of Switch game cartridges were. The Target sales person warned us that earlier cartridges by Nintendo were regional locked but fortunately this was not the case with the Switch. This means that while you can purchase the Nintendo Switch from outside of the US and not have to worry about cartridges that you purchase in the US being incompatible. 

We purchased the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe from this Target.

Unlike the bulky cartridges of old, the Nintendo Switch's cartridge is basically an encrypted flash memory card like what you see with SD cards but using a proprietary design.

Inserting the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe into the Console, we could confirm there were no regional restrictions and operate the game just fine.

One of the challenges with users trying to experience the Nintendo Switch is the lack of a lot of games that can be downloaded from the Nintendo eShop compared to how easy it is for casual gamers to download games on their smartphones. For now, users will have to depend on the legacy method of using cartridges and fortunately there is no regional lock anymore causing inconvenience for users.