If you go to Japan and open the Google PlayStore you'll find out that you are unable to install some local apps. But is there a solution to work around that problem? Let's take the example of 'Dragon Ball Legends' which was released this summer. And in the Google Play Store there is a 'western' version and a Japanese version.
However, if you search for the Japanese version using katakana the game doesn't appear in result list. Just English suggestions. But why?
The reason is that your Google Play Store account needs to be associated to the country Japan instead of your local one. If you currently live in Japan it makes to be able to see all the apps. Therefore, what's the next step?
Change to the country! I would suggest the following way (via browser):
Login in Google PlayStore website
Go to "Google Account" in the upper right
Select "Payments and Subscriptions"
"Manage Payment methods"
Go to setting to see your "payments profile"
Change it to the "Japan" and add necessary information
Confirm and wait (can take maybe a few days)
Once it's completed, check on your phone if your are connect to the correct payment profile associated with the country you are living. Now go to PlayStore and see if you can find local apps.
This weekend I went for the Tokyo Game Show for the first time and I got the chance to test a few of the new games which caught my interest.
Knowing there would be a long queue I still arrived a bit late which made me wait for almost 2 hours to get in.
But the wait was worth it. Many big halls and so many different stands. After running around for getting a general impression of the event I stopped at Bandai Namco, because one game got me really interested:
It's Jump Force. A game which puts several characters from JUMP magazine together, including Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto and more! The trailer itself gave me this "I wanna play" feeling with showing great stages like Namek, Himeji Castle or New York's Times Square. After a wait for around 30-40 minutes in the queue I got to play a 3 vs 3 battle. I selected Frieza, Luffy and Vegeta to fight on Namek. The demo was for two rounds until the first fighter was knocked out. The game is fun to play and the graphics are running stunning to see. I couldn't get deep into special moves or combos - at the end I just found out how to switch characters during the fight. It generally left a great impression and as there seems to be a story with a few from Akira Toriyama exclusively created characters makes the entire game even more interesting...
Following that I stopped by at the racing game area and some nostalgia put me into the line to test another game: V-Rally 4! Back in PS1 and PS2 days I liked the series. Especially I spent many years in the career of V-Rally 3 in the mid-2000s. I wasn't aware that finally a sequel is coming! The demo was one stage with a GoPro-sponsored car with a big rear wing. I clearly underestimated the cars reaction in the corners causing me a few crashes at the beginning. Plus: Manual shifting was activated! However at the end of the stage everything went more smoothly and I slowly got ready for more. It certainly brought back some nostalgia!
So... Since I was in the area - time for the next racing game: MotoGP 18! To be honest: I haven't played a lot of MotoGP games in the last decade, but there were times of the old MotoGP3 and 4 which I got to play a lot. Therefore, as expected it didn't take me long to get into the flow. Unfortunately the riding helps were activated and the difficulty quite easy. Meaning that despite a crash in lap 1 out of 3 and some general starting difficulties I was able to reach P10 at the end with Valentino Rossi! Was really fun to play again!
As it was getting afternoon, there was one more game I had to try out! Back to the Bandai Namco area and this time in the One Piece World Seeker queue! The game trailers were already promising showing an game-exclusive storyline with many major characters like Aokiji, Fujitora or Lucci involved. Ahead of the demo you get a manual to memorize the important controls. Once you get started you are playing Luffy running up a hill punching some marines. You get used to the attacks, especially the Red Hawk is quite powerful. The whole graphic of the landscape is quite impressive! After a fight with Kuma you are confronted with Sakazuki alias Aka Inu. The fight is a bit more difficult than the previous one, but still no problem. But Sabo comes to help Luffy as the demo ends. At the end you also get some stickers from the characters of the game, nice!
As the time was running out I soon left the place. It was quite interesting how much is offered there to see and play! A fun and inspiring day came to an end. Of course there was so much more to see like many other franchises I'm not that involved in, but I'm sure everyone would have found something interesting! Until another time!
a new Dragon Ball game is out. This time for smartphones - and for free! So it's very to check it out.
Throughout the past couple of months I was aware that this game was in the making and about to be released in summer, but I somewhere missed the point that it was actually free to play.
A colleague at work got me into it since he was already playing for a while.
So, to the game itself: Story wise you follow Shallot, a new game-only Saiyan, who is gets in touch with for Z fighters for the Tournament of Time.
The battle system itself is quite easy to play: You get cards for sprint attacks, blasts or little power-ups (as seen on the screenshot). You can charge yourself by holding your finger on the touch screen and also do single punches or blasts without using the cards.
Your are in a team with up to three fighters with which you can switch during the battle. Each character needs to be leveled up, be it by single training, joining the story battle or playing against others. You can exchange a friends code and fight against friends.
Apart from that you are able for daily summons - means that you can get new characters - for example recently they added some movie characters like Freeza's brother Coola.
As it seems they are adding more and more content to the game like extra story arcs, characters... So I hope we should see more Dragon Ball Super characters soon.
Therefore, I can recommend the game, it's fun to play!
It's quite a debate among fans about which of these two games is the better one. Recently TeamFourStar rated their own favorite Dragon Ball games and both Budokai 3 and Tenkaichi 3 were the favorites... For TeamFourStar Budokai 3 ended up at the first place with Tenkaichi 3 as a close second. Personally I would have put it the other way around, but I can understand their rating for that order. The general thing about Tenkaichi 3 which makes it my all-time favorite is, that you can fly easily through a big 3D arena and can fight against your opponent using several tactics. Plus we have 98 characters in 161 transformations making that DB game the one with the highest number of playable characters. It's a game which does not get boring, if you want to fight against a friend once in a while. Selecting five fighters each and go for it. Also one of the only DB fighting games which come close to the real Dragon Ball fights.
In comparison Budokai 3 has not these kind of 3D elements. Of course you can move in a certain way, but the handling is nowhere close to Tenkaichi 3. The Raging Blast games (which were released for the next generation of consoles like PS3) came also close to that way of fighting, but it's not the same. But still, there are elements in Budokai 3 I still favour: The story mode where you could fly around Earth and Namek (which was similar in Tenkaichi 2), the way you could unlock and add attacks and abilities.
Both games had iconic and awesome soundtrack I still love listened to today, although the ones from the Budokai series have its special flair (although some of the were reused the the first Tenkaichi game). Generally: Both games set its benchmarks and are despite being older than 10 years still loved by fans around the world. And successors would be highly appreciated as many fan modder adding new characters from the Super series into these classic games (especially Tenkaichi 3).
So whichever of both games you prefer, I can understand both sites.
It was THE Dragon Ball Z fighting game for the PlayStation 2. 161 characters and the way of fighting came really close to how it would be in the TV series. Despite many new games have been released since then - many fans want that game from 2007 back. The currently quite popular Dragon Ball games are Xenoverse and its recently released successor Xenoverse 2. These games are in terms of story with the Time Patrols quite interesting and playing it online is also quite cool. But - in my view - the fighting system or the handling itself is not as fun as in the final part of the Budokai Tenkaichi series. I admit, nostalgia is also playing a part, but playing a Dragon Ball game having been released since then is mostly disappointing, if you know Tenkaichi 3 from 2007. Of course, the story in Tenkaichi 3 was quite short and easy to get through, but it's always awesome for having a fast 5 vs. 5 match against a friend. The controls are easy, the battles are fast and really fun - and that after almost 10 years.
Modded Tenkaichi 3 games on YouTube
An update on the current console generation like PS4 would have much potential. Especially now, where the Dragon Ball universe has expanded with new characters and the story of Dragon Ball Super. And people are still loving Tenkaichi 3 - just go to YouTube and look for videos of modded Tenkaichi 3 like grognougnou's channel. You'll find videos of fusions with SSJ Blue mods with millions of clicks. I also couldn't help and modded my Tenkaichi 3 game with instructions and downloads being published on another website. So Namco Bandai would surely sell enough copies if they would release an updated version of Tenkaichi 3 for the PS4 or other consoles. And how often you read comments like 'best DBZ game ever made'?
Answers from Bandai Namco
Such a re-release happened in 2012 with Budokai and Budokai 3 being released as 'Dragon Ball Z Budokai HD Collection'. So what's the situation with a new Budokai Tenkaichi 3 release?
The guys from the YouTube channel Rhymestyle actually talked to a guy from Bandai Namco about this topic in January 2015 (see video above), the man seemed interested, but they never heard of him again. And if you the Internet about that topic most reports are from the first half of 2015 - but apparently no recent information. It seems that it was considered, news of that possibility were spread, but that was it. There were also several petitions, but all I could see was that they were closed by now never reaching 6,000 signatures. Interestingly, Treevax (the guy who is working on game concepts for a possible Raging Blast 3) also got some answers from Bandai staff concerning Tenkaichi 3 - but this is from February 2013:
Will there ever be a Tenkaichi HD Collection?First, you must know that making the Budokai HD Collection has been a real copyright maze. This is one of the reasons why we didn’t have Budokai 2 in the collection. Though, they succeeded into obtaining the rights, and made the game.I’ve been told that making Tenkaichi HD Collection would be even more complicated. Thus, it might never been made, because of copyright issues (game content, BGM…).
So, copyright issues... I'm aware within the Budokai series there were tracks produced by Kenji Yamamoto, but facing some plagiarism issues around 2011 the composer didn't produce any more Dragon Ball music. About Tenkaichi 3 I just know that the theme song 'Super Survivor' was produced by Yamamoto. So there's more behind it. To sum this up: Many fans want it, but there are apparently issues with the rights making this even more difficult. I don't know if they're working on it or not - we may just have to be more patient...
Maybe you have already seen several Tenkaichi 3 gameplay videos on YouTube showing new characters like Beerus, Whis or the Super Saiyan Blue in the old PS2 game. This tutorial will show you how it's done. Just to be clear: I'm not able to create my own characters, but thanks to guys like Kinnikuchi (check out his blog) you can download new characters and stages to modify your own game. Note: Your PS2 has to be able to run copied games - either with having an integrated chip, using ESR or running the game from the local or external hard disk drive - or via LAN if you like it that way. For testing this whole scenario I would recommend you to have an emulator, but more on that later. 1) Copy the disk to your PC The first procedure is the same as you would change the background music of the game: Extract your DVD to a local folder in order to apply the patches. 2) Download the patches! Go to the blog of Kinnikuchi and download the characters or stages available on the download page. And to be clear: These patches don't extent the amount of playable characters - certain characters (mostly weak ones from the first Dragon Ball series) are replaced with the newer characters. Sometimes characters are added by replacing a costume, or some characters do even have new costumes for themselves. Also the new stages are replacing other stages. 3) Prepare the extracted folder Within the tutorial download from Kinnikuchi you'll get the AFS Explorer and an *.afl file. Before applying the patches, start this explorer tool and select 'File', 'Import AFS file'. Choose the PZS3US1.afs (from your extracted directory). Now import the file name list (´Advanced', 'Import file name list') by selecting the downloaded afl file in order to prepare your game for the new patches and changes within the game. Finish the process by clicking 'File', 'Update'. The game folder is now ready to be patched. 4) Apply the patches
Each download contains a folder with (mostly) a picture of the character/stage, a Readme file (where you can find out what will be changed with this new character/stage) and a dkz file which is the patch. Open the patch with the DKZ Studio and select 'Patch', 'Apply patch in folder', where you select your extracted folder. This can take a few moments to finish. Now you can apply any of these downloaded patches in the same way. Just read the description in order to make sure that you don't override some characters you may want to keep. 5) Burn it and test it!
In the final step I'd recommend to burn the complete game folders with IMGBurn. In order to test it properly it would be helpful to have a savegame with all characters unlocked. These are available in the Internet, you may just have to convert them for your PS2. But to make sure if everything worked out, you should better do that with an emulator like PCSX2. And if every change is fine, try it on your PS2 - either burned on a disk or installed on your HDD. Have fun with these new characters and enjoy immersing into the world of Dragon Ball Super in an old familiar game!
This tutorial shows you precisely how you can change the background music from the classic PS2 game Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3.
Back in 2013 I already made a tutorial about this topic here on my blog, but this time I want to go more deeply into it with having more knowledge and experience about it - also with additional video material. Note: Your PS2 has to be able to run copied games - either with having an integrated chip, using ESR or running the game from the local or external hard disk drive - or via LAN if you like it that way. For testing this whole scenario I would recommend you to have an emulator, but more on that later. 1) Copy the disk to your PC Select a folder to copy the content of the DVD on your local drive. It contains the folders 'BIN', 'DATA' and 'IRX' plus two files to give the disk an ID (also it looks different depending on the version - EU or US). For the music modding you just need to focus on the folder 'DATA'.
2) Open the AFS file with '2' in it using DKZ Studio Within the folder 'Data' you'll find a file named like PZS3US2 (in the US version) or PZS3EU2 (European version). You need to open this file with the tool DKZ Studio, which you can find online. As you can see then this archive is filled with a huge amount of files from the game, mostly with character voices or noises as adx files. With double-click you can listen to every piece of sound because luckily the software has en adx player included. With this huge amount of files it's divided in three pages and you'll find the actual background music close to the end of the third pages. The files are named like this: zs3_00_US.adx (again, US version). 3) Changing the background music So and here's the interesting part: In order to change the music you need to convert your music to the adx format. So you need to go and check for the PES Sound File Converter. With that tool it's pretty easy to do. Click on 'Add' to select the files you want to convert, go 'Next', select the output folder and the process will run. And: Also mark that the song should run in a loop!
Before in terms of the file itself there's only one thing you need to look after: The size. As you can see in the screenshot above all the files are having a size between 3 and 5 MB. The created adx file should have a lower size than the file you want to change it with in order to work without any conflicts or error messages. So you need to shrink your mp3 files to a lower quality. I used the video editing tool Sony Vegas for that, but there are surely better ways to manage that. So let's say you now have an adx file with a suitable file size, then you need to rename it to the file you are planning to change it with. Then, - in DKZ Studio - right-click the music file which is about to change, click 'Import' and select your converted file with the same name. If no error message shows up, the whole process worked out. Now, do the same with other music tracks you are planning to change. You'll also notice on the file icon which files were already changed. 4) Create a patch With every change done the whole thing should be saved. By using 'File' and 'Save' I sometimes ended up not having the correct size of the afs file which meant lots of files were missing. So I recommend the following way: Create a patch with all your changes! So go to 'Patch' and select 'New Patch (With Modified)'.
A dkz file will be created. The file includes your music and after double-clicking it you have to select 'Patch' and then 'Apply patch in folder' before choosing the destination folder. So go to the place where you extracted your DVD and select the 'DATA' folder. All changes will be applied. Now check if the file size didn't drop and also the changing date of PZS3US2.afs should be quite up-to-date. 5) Burn it and test it! I'd recommend to use IMGBurn to create an ISO file with the extracted DVD files including your changed afs file. Confirm the suggested label name and let the process run. With a completed ISO image you need to find a way to test it. A quick and fast check would be possible with an PS2 emulator like PCSX2. You only need to find a matching BIOS. Of course you can also burn it or copy it to your hard drive directly but it would be good to know if it really works. If you changed the first file (zs3_00_US.adx called 'The Meteor') you directly notice after the intro video if the process worked. To check all the background music, go to 'Duel', select two fighters and while selecting the stage you can move to the right to check all the BGM. Have fun to fight with your own music! And did you notice the screenshots with the new characters? If you want to see more, visit the blog and other channels of Kinnikuchu. A tutorial from my site will follow soon.
In the Japanese edition of Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (in Japan published as Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! METEOR) we have the many tracks from the TV series unlike in the US or European version where this soundtrack was substituted with a new music. But now we have the opportunity to exchange the soundtrack with the original soundtrack or anything we want.
In the folder 'data' you'll find three afs-files. Most important for replacing the background audio is the file pzs3eu2.afs (the letters 'eu' might be different depending on where you're from).
This file has to be opened by the DKZ Studio. Then you see the archive is divided in three pages - you have to go to the last one (3) and scroll almost to the end.
The PS2 audio files are in the adx-format. The background soundtrack is named like zs3_00_US.adx and so on. In the next step you should convert your favourited music from mp3 to adx. That's why you need the PES Sound File Converter:
After selecting the file, click 'next', chose a destination folder and press 'convert'. You may check the first setting for making an adx-file with a complete loop.
Following that you have to rename the output file with the same name like the file to be replaced with (like zs3_00_US.adx). Then you need to use the DKZ Studio again, right-click the adx-file to replace and select 'import'. Then chose the before created adx-file.
The adx-file has now been replaced and you should save the afs-archive (floppy disk icon as usual).
For having a proper ISO-image to use, the original file pzs3eu2.afs has to be exchanged within the ISO-image.
Luckily the DKZ Studio is also able to open ISO-images. Now you only have to do the same with the afs-file like done before with the adx-file. Right-click, replace and save - and know you have a modified ISO.
Ok, I have read in forums that it's also possible to simply create an ISO out of the extracted files. Unfortunately this ISO never really worked in an emulator - the image could never boot.
Yes, an emulator. Before burning it or copying the image to PS2 hard disk it would be better to test the image previously. The PCSX2 is always a good way to find it out if everything works.
If you have chosen the z3_00-adx-file you'll hear the confirmation that it worked directly at the start screen...
