Warning, the following is a rant, if you don't care, hit the Back button now. Thank You.
So yeah, a lot of people are clamoring and hoping for 5pb's Cave shooting game ports being region free. Dream on kids, it ain't happening. First of all, you're all wishing for a Japanese company to do something against "the way it's done." The Japanese culture is often times shockingly single minded, almost to the point of a hive-mind. The logic breaks down as follows. We're a Japanese company. Microsoft included regional codes in their SDK. They would like us to include regional locks in our software. We'll use their tools and follow their guidelines, and include region locks. (Now pay attention, this is what Western logic fails to grasp.) IF THEY DIDN'T WANT US TO REGION CODE OUR GAMES, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE INCLUDED THE OPTION IN THE SDK. See, this is why Japanese companies region lock their games, because that's the way it's done. It never even had to have been explicitly stated in the documentation, a Japanese programmer would simply notice the option, and follow the logical conclusion; Japanese games get the appropriate region code.
Additionally, there seems to a bit of confusion about the region-lock-free software available for the 360. The incorrect notion seems to be that HK/Asia versions of games are region-free, and will boot on US/EU consoles. That is not 100% true. HK software is often nothing more than the original game disc that was sold in its territory of origin, Japan or the US, just with Chinese language packaging. US originating software usually doesn't have a region lock (probably because US/Western programmers don't use the same logic I outlined above). Since most people who import HK games do so with titles like Bioshock, which were never region-locked, it creates the impression that HK games are "region-free." Not true, HK versions (usually) have the same territorial restrictions AS THEIR ORIGINAL SOURCE (Japan=locked, US=usually unlocked). The Asia version of Ketsui X/DDP Dai-Ou-Jou X WILL BE REGION LOCKED. Of course, there are exceptions to this,
Play-Asia has a great guide, use it. But note that P-A doesn’t have any sort of inside information about the software from the publishers, it looks like they rely on customer feedback to fill in the data. So if no one with a NTSC-U/C Xbox tries the Asia version of Bomberman Act Zero, we’ll never know how it’s region coded.
My third reason for this rant. Raiden Fighters Aces is a great shooting game collection, why don't we have petitions for that to be region free? Cave game's seem be surrounded by a particularly vocal and whiny crowd, who start to bitch and moan at the drop of a hat. It gets on my nerves every time it starts (every time a Cave game gets a port), but I could distance myself from it in the past since the games were all PS2, a club I never joined. I bought a NTSC-J 360 to play Japanese games, and now Success, and 5pb, are giving me great games to play, thanks guys.
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