If you’ve only got an account for the PSN region that you live in. You could be missing out on some great (or at least interesting) downloads.
Whether its region exclusive demos, downloadable games, themes, trailers, etc there’s a lot out there that isn’t available in the North American store… and a lot that never will be.
While Sony doesn’t condone creating accounts for other regions, they haven’t brought down the ban hammer that keeps Xbox Live users from creating accounts in other regions. So it’s relatively safe. Sony has removed region locking from most of their games and downloadable stuff, so to me this is the new face of importing games! Plus, if you’re willing to go through the trouble of getting these downloads than you’ve earned it!
This post is about creating a Honk Kong account. The HK account is a good one to start with because it has a lot of what’s on the Japanese store, but most of the menu and game titles are in English.
One thing to note before you download a PSP or PSX games is that you can only have one PSN account tied to your PSP. If you already have you’re standard account tied to it. You won’t be able to play the games you’ve downloaded using other accounts on it.
First you’ll have to create a new login ID for PS3. A standard practice is just to pick your current username and add HK to it. To create a new account, go to the far left of the XMB, logout and choose the new user option.
Being the newly created account this will probably be set to the default account for the console so press triangle on your original account and you’ll be able to set it back to the default login.
Now that you’re logged into you new PS3 account go to the Playstation Network section of the XMB and choose “Sign up for the PlayStation Network”.
Choose to create a Master Account, and use a different email than your other account. If you don’t have another just create a new hotmail or gmail account to use.
On the information screen choose Hong Kong as your country, and the fields will change to reflect that. Just choose a random address (# and street name) and enter Kowloon/Kowloon Bay for the region.
At this point don’t enter any billing information. The Asian networks will not accept US credit cards so there’s no point really. Just skip the step and you’re all set up.
Now try browsing the store. There’s a ton of good PS1 games worth importing. You can find a free trial of a puzzle game called XIII, nothing great, but since you’ll probably be excited to download your first import you might as well grab it.
Now you just need to get some HK PSN Tickets (cards). A 150$HK goes for about $30 US that’ll get you a couple PS1 games as they go for 33$HK each.
At this point I’ve only purchased cards from play-asia.com. The shipping was cheap but did take several weeks to arrive. There are retailers online who will offer to actually send you the code from the card directly, so I’ll post a list of reliable ones once I get around to verifying who’s good.
Have fun!
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