You dont have to copy save games to be able to cheat though. As long as there are tools that lets you modify your own savegames, that is enough.
On Wii Saved Games were used to smuggle in the Homebrew Channel, which means the ability to run your or someone elses code.
Hackers only had to get that one single key and were able to modify one single saved game per region to get their code running on all consoles.
This method simply wouldn't work on 3DS/Wii U, because every single console has its own key to encrypt/decrypt saved games.
Fair enough. You can "region lock" your system manually now by the way. Its just to buy games only from the region where your console is from.
By selling the PS3 as a "region free" console, buying games from other regions should work. Always. Which simply isn't the case.
Just the fact that one single game is region locked is enough proof to show that.
That fact is still wrong even when it's getting repeated over and over.
It's at least 2 games. Persona 4 Arena + Joysound Drive are explicitly region locked on PS3. And various others are not fully playable depending on the region of the console, which I have to see as region locked as well. There is not a lot difference between a game getting blocked and a game not being playable on a console from a specific region.
And at least the Metal Gear Rising demo was even IP region locked to the JP store.
Concidering how widespread internet usage is today, it probably shouldnt be too hard to find info about it before buying it yourself. If in doubt, just buy the game from the same region as the console you own. That would be your only option if the console was region locked anyway.
So now it's my problem to figure out if a game works on the so called "region free" PS3 or if it doesn't? That's not what "region free" is supposed to be.
The games should simply WORK. All of them.
That said, i fully agree that it would be nice if all developers concidered the button issues.
I would go a step further. It's PRIMARILY Sony's flipping job to at least implement an option to change the X/O button actions. That way buggy games wouldn't really be a problem. It would still be stupid, but at least fixable by the user him/herself.
This problem is going on for ages now.
The PS4 from firmware 2.50 allows you to change the button layouts, a similar solution could perhaps be possible for the PS3 if there is enough RAM available for the OS to use such a function.
It seems this feature won't fix it at all, because it doesn't let you specify a button for "confirm" / "maru" and "cancel" / "batsu" actions. You can only map X to O and O to X, but that's not what that issue is actually about.
You see, in the PS3 SDK you could either ask if a specific button was pressed or if the "confirm" or "cancel" button got pressed.
This "confirm" or "cancel" button translated to either X or O depending on the setting inside your console. And that's the whole problem. Some developers just assumed that "confirm" is always X and "cancel" is always O and didn't use the one actually asking for "X" or "O".
I think even some Sony software does exactly that instead of doing it properly. It's a systematic issue because of bad SDK design.
btw. what are you talking about not enough memory on PS3? The X/O switch IS ALREADY AN OPTION on PS3 internally. The user is just not able to change it. If I hacked my PS3, I could actually change this option. Permanently. I don't want the option to change it while playing a game. I just want an option to change it at all.
Thanks for the examples. I must admit that i was hoping to see a concrete list concidering that you said that it was simply a nightmare. That made me think that these things were well documented.
If those were actually well documented, it wouldn't be such a nightmare, because there would be a list, that you could simply check before buying. Instead there are sometimes forum posts complaing about the issue and most of the time, that's when a game is 100% unplayable and not when there are "just" wrong button prompts for QTEs and such.
Any game that I buy at or near release date is a gamble. Which is why I almost never buy any PS3 game at or near release date at all.
There might not be a 100% complete list, but the community is usually pretty good when it comes to making lists about what works or not, even if its not 100% complete.
It simply seems that almost noone cares about it, because almost noone uses "region free" features. It's extremely niche. As I said - most people own a console from their own region and play games from their own region as well.
I think I imported a total of 1 or 2 games on DS in total.
Even my own situation with PS3 was caused by Sony's inability to simply release a white regular PS3 in Europe. That's why I got one from Hong Kong, while I was in Hong Kong. Would I have bought one from there in case a white PS3 would have been released in Europe? No. Would I have bought one in case I would have known how bad this "region free" functionality actually is? No.
People care about bluray region codes, but people who are able to check for those are a tiny minority, because almost everyone only owns a player from their own region. That's why there are still an insane amount of blurays on
www.blu-ray.com, which are not properly checked and that's just inserting a bluray, checking if it plays and then removing it. Which takes around 10 seconds. Fully playing a game to check if something is broken on a console takes way more time.
Videogame "press" also doesn't give a crap about those issues.
I have noticed tons of button prompt issues in all sorts of games. Sure, I could have made some blog about it. But why should I put in even more effort, when those companies including Sony give a shit about it? They won't fix it anyway, because they don't care.
As I said - Sony could somewhat solve this whole button issue with a simple change inside their firmware. But they do not care. If more consumers would actually use the region free functionality, maybe they would care.