XBox - JPN Demos and Games-On-Demand - region locked?

[englishbob]

I have a UK 360 and signed up using a JPN LIVE account so that I could download the MMPork DLC.

I was having a poke around the Japanese marketplace last night, and found the Catherine demo. Downloaded it and to my suprise it worked on the UK 360!

Are all demos region free? and what about Games On Demand? (I spotted Raiden on there!)

[chopemon]

Games on Demand are generally region locked but all demos except the Resi 5 demo will work. The Resi 5 demo came out in Japan first so there was a flurry of people in the west making dummy accounts so they IP locked it.

[englishbob]

Thanks, I may well trawl the marketplace for some good demos.

[Yakumo]

You'll notice the Japanese store doesn't have many action titles or arcade releases that the west got. No OutRun on-line, No Final Fight, No Turtles arcade, No Turtles in Time and so on. I had to get al of them from the UK store but they all work fine on my JPN 360.

[charlesr]

Are there any more recent Japan only demos that are IP region locked?

Or games on demand?

[charlesr]

Bump - need to know asap so if anyone can shed any light on this, please let me know. Thanks.

[fuse]

I've not had the opportunity to tinker for a while, but afaik there's not been any other instances of IP locked demos. Games on Demand still need a Japanese IP to kick off the download, and then a Japanese-region console to boot them.

[smouty]

For demos that are region free try digiex.net

[charlesr]

Games on Demand still need a Japanese IP to kick off the download, and then a Japanese-region console to boot them.

So are they ALL hardware region locked? Are there any that if I had a Japanese IP I could buy?
And if I attempt it (with a VPN) will it notice the hardware region issue before allowing me to cough up the cash?

[fuse]

I have not tested this extensively myself, but everything I've read on the topic suggests that the games have the same region-encoding as their disc-based counterparts. So if the game is region-free as a disc, it'll be region-free as a 'game on demand'. Those that are hardware region-locked don't give you any warning prior to booting the game.

[charlesr]

Cheers dude.