Once upon a time, the Dragon Ball franchise was behind some of Atari’s highest grossing titles. Throw the words “dragon” “ball” and “budokai” on a box and Atari would be looking at money in the bank. Those days are behind us — Namco Bandai has announced that its secured exclusive North American rights to publish all future Dragon Ball titles across all major consoles and handhelds for the next five years.

The deal officially begins in January of 2010, but Namco Bandai are getting a head begin later this year. The publisher has secured the rights to publish three Dragon Ball titles in 2009: Dragon Ball: Raging Blast for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3; Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo for the Wii; and Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans for Nintendo DS.

If you don’t know who Grandmaster Flash is, you need to take some kind of modern music history class. Or play Activision’s DJ Hero when it ships this fall… because he’s in it.

Grandmaster Flash contributed both his likeness and exclusive mixes to the game — “DJ Kool & DJ Demo ‘Here Comes My DJ’ vs Gary Numan ‘Cars’” and “Herbie Hancock ‘Rockit’ vs N.E.R.D. ‘Lapdance’.” Additionally, you’ll hear his voice during the game’s tutorial mode, and developer Freestyle Games created an exclusive mix for the game using two of “Grandmaster Flash’s original creations” (whatever that means), “Boom” and “Tap.”

Activision has also released two gameplay videos of the aforementioned mix tracks, with both of them being played on Expert. While I haven’t put my hands on the deck yet, both of the tracks look really… simple. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d expect players to be hitting the middle button — the sample trigger track — more often than I’m seeing.

Maybe it’s one of those deceptively difficult games. I hope to find out as soon as Activision lets me go hands-on with the peripheral. Honestly, I can’t wait.