Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3
Image: Genki/Crave Entertainment

After 20 years, a fan has finally produced a working patch that will let players beat the PS2 racing game Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, without having to resort to cheat devices like a GameShark.

Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, just in case you've never heard of it, is the third game in the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series (otherwise known as Shutokou Battle in Japan and Tokyo Highway Challenge in Europe). It was released in North America by Crave Entertainment in 2003, with this version introducing a rather nasty localization bug/oversight that prevented players from being able to hit the requirements to unlock a rival racer you have to beat to access the final boss (you have to beat all the rival racers in he game to make them appear).

As the story goes, during the localization process, the team working on the North American version decided to convert the in-game currency from Japanese Yen to US Dollars by dividing the value by 100 but failed to change the currency requirements for two racers in the game: Whirlwind Fanfare and Exotic Butterfly.

This meant that the Exotic Butterfly rival was now much harder to unlock than in the Japanese version with players having to grind out 20 million credits (more credits than you'll typically earn in an entire run of the game), whereas the Whirlwind Fanfare was, in essence, impossible to face (as it required the player to hit 100 million credits and a new cap had been set at 99,999,999).

In the past, players could use an Action Replay or GameShark device to unlock the "Infinite Cash" and "Max CP" or use Cheat Engine to manually alter the money, but now thanks to this new hack from Kinglink, it's possible to simply patch the file to decrease the currency requirements to be in line with the changes elsewhere.

You can grab the patch here.

[source romhacking.net]