# Even though PAL games are inferior to NTSC, some are still very valuable.



## Deleted User (Feb 11, 2020)

I used to collect PAL games of NES, SNES, N64, NGC, Wii, Xbox, PS1, PS2 but since I needed space I just sold them on eBay a few years ago and I'm okay with it considering the NTSC run at better performance than PAL copies do.

However, despite that PAL are a downgrade from NTSC their value remains the same as before, which is not surprising (it never lost its value). I reckon folks who're buying are collectors than to actually play it.

Examples:

#1


Spoiler












#2


Spoiler











Nowadays, I admit I pirate games, but I always pick NTSC-U/J copies to play the games at the correct performance.

A comparison of Tekken 2's NTSC vs PAL running speed:



I always thought it was strange how everything was so slow, and turns out it was because I was playing an inferior copy. ^^"


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## Taleweaver (Feb 12, 2020)

Boesy said:


> I reckon folks who're buying are collectors than to actually play it.


I would reckon the same. Most gamers chase either the newest AAA-trends. Others are drowning in indie games. That makes retro gamers a bit of a niche group. Add to that the fact that every game that has been even slightly popular has seen at least one remaster or remake at some point, and of course that pirated ROMS aren't exactly hard to find online. So whom else would buy these aside collectors? 

(I'd also argue that PAL isn't always slower/inferior than NTSC, but I honestly don't care enough about the technical details to look up to what degree it matters. I mean...I can't tell significant difference in this video, but if you can then all the power to you I guess)


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## Alexander1970 (Feb 12, 2020)

Hello.



This here is an great Example of Speed from PAL vs. NTSC.
Please see for yourself and play it with you Emulator of your Choice and try PAL and NTSC Version/Settings.
You will "hear" the Difference.

For the original Post: I like the PAL Version(s) more,because they are slower and easier to beat in some Places....
This "slower" Factor is not really noticeable today of Monitors/4K Devices and so on,but you notice it for sure on old CRT TV Sets.

Thank you.


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## emigre (Feb 12, 2020)

In fairness, the NTSC vs PAL was mainly due to developers not optimising their game for PAL. IIRC PAL Crash Bandicoot plays fine when compared to NTSC. I think the main issue was a lot of the big players didn't care much for the European market. The switch to HD has been a godsend in this regard.

I bought a copy of Persona 3 FES nearly ten years ago for about £10. It goes for about £90 now.


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## FAST6191 (Feb 12, 2020)

16 bit and older was common to see game wide slowdown and black borders thanks to devs not caring about ports. Sometimes there were good ports, and sometimes PAL was the lead development region for games and then NTSC regions got bad ports.

Post 16 bit there were perks and downsides (ignoring things coming out later or not at all, sometimes bugfixes, less censorship and extra content, other times lacking early higher resolutions, widescreen and some content when licensing was a thing) but generally if it made it there then it was all pretty playable with animations taking the appropriate amount of milliseconds (if not outright having 60Hz modes). Plus SCART was a thing.

Now with most things being HDMI and TVs supporting things (granted most PAL TVs made in the 90s would support 60Hz but few noted that).


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## Skelletonike (Feb 12, 2020)

I never cared much. Even when I buy old games for my collection I always stick to the European copy of available. In most cases the difference is minimal.


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## Viri (Feb 12, 2020)

The very first time I played Super Metroid was on 3DS using an emulator. At first, when I played it, I thought the emulator was just being shitty, because the game felt a lot slower than what I seen on Youtube, also the FPS was in the 50's. Felt sluggish for some reason. Than about an hour in, I noticed I had the PAL version. I deleted it, downloaded the NTSC version, and it felt better.


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## eyeliner (Feb 12, 2020)

Most times, PAL games are more expensive because of the simple fact that they had lesser units on the market.
You'd have to be extremely lucky to get some of the best RPGs on each system, shoot'em ups and other gems.

Looking at yoou Tales of Symphonia and Baten Kaitos on GameCube that I had to import.
Looking at you Ikaruga that I never found on any store.

But i got both Suikoden games for the PSX that I still own, despite my PSX having been sold ages ago. That must count for something, right? Got to sell them, I guess.

Weird times that the digital marketplace came to mitigate. Good riddance to those times, indeed.


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## Spider_Man (Feb 12, 2020)

the only difference between the two mainly was the output of tvs, both games ran and performed the same way, just some stupid reason us poor fucks in the PAL regions had shitty tvs that ran at 50hz.

but theres little difference really unless your like a super n00b who wants to look at the finer end of a fart.

i think value of games, such as retro, PAL hold more value because NTSC regions usually hit the market before PAL, and were more prone to having counterfeit versions.

Take nintendo as an example, most of the clone carts for all their consoles are labelled up as NTSC.


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## Clydefrosch (Feb 12, 2020)

honestly, i played all my games in pal when i was young and i didn't really feel like they played bad or anything.
and i know that the better publishers did convert their games in a way that even at 50hz, the game played at the same speed as the ntsc version.

i sometimes wonder if emulators ntsc/pal settings really represent what I experienced when i played these games as a kid. unfortunately, i dont have the originals around to compare anymore.

no idea why some pal games are more expensive. potentially because less units sold. investing time and money into multi language translations probably made some games a bit more expensive and they didn't want to risk sitting on leftovers...


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## Reynardine (Feb 12, 2020)

It's funny. I grew up with PAL SNES and (even worse) N64 and games like Super Mario 64 always had this floaty feeling to them. I thought that this is how it should be, I didn't know any better.

By now I've gotten used to playing NTSC versions at the original speed on emulators and I find it hard to play on my real N64 anymore. For Gamecube the problem was gone for many games because they offer a PAL60 mode.

Also when I bought the PAL Zelda Twilight Princess for Gamecube a few years ago it was really expensive. For some reason that game never lost its value.


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## Uiaad (Feb 12, 2020)

There are a lot of pluses and minuses to both NTSC and PAL. A blanket statement that PAL is inferior simply isn't true and the you are only looking at the one aspect much bigger picture.

It is much less to do with the formats themselves and more about the developers and this really did cut both ways, altho at differing times and systems. If you take a look back at the Micro-Computer era of the 80's early 90's british devs really didn't give a flying fuck about America and NTSC, because the market was here and it was booming and europe and other PAL  territories where were it was at and specially with systems like the Amiga, where timing was so very very critical to pretty much everything this is why you didn't get the Micro-computer boom in the States that you got in Europe and Australia.

I can't sit here and say that Sega and Nintendo weren't popular in the UK and europe ( altho the NES launch was a complete clusterfuck with there being 2 versions both incompatible with each other, first by Mattel and then later by Nintendo themselves) but it wasn't really until Commodore and Atari flopped out of the Micro markets that we majorly embraced the console for staple gaming ( SNES/MegaDrive(Genesis) era ) but even then these were pre-internet and importing games from the Ole USA was still very expensive

The time we majorly started seeing issues was the PS1 era this is generally down to publishers and devs not quite knowing what this blossoming market really wanted and from their point of view it was more cost effective to just bang out quick and dirty hacks of NTSC games.

As far as value goes with pal games i think it comes down to publishers not wanting to left holding vast quantities of a game that flopped. I have to say here I'm not a collector or flipper but there are a couple of sealed copies of Suikoden II locked away for a rainy day, as my well used copy. I think the numbers i heard bounded around for that game back in the day was between 10,000 and 20,000 copies for the whole of europe ( could have just been the UK )  I know that when It came to Suikoden 3 for PS2 they had no faith in it at all in Europe and eventually canceled it despite it being in a finished state.


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## duwen (Feb 12, 2020)

Taleweaver said:


> I would reckon the same. Most gamers chase either the newest AAA-trends. Others are drowning in indie games. That makes retro gamers a bit of a niche group. Add to that the fact that every game that has been even slightly popular has seen at least one remaster or remake at some point, and of course that pirated ROMS aren't exactly hard to find online. So whom else would buy these aside collectors?
> 
> (I'd also argue that PAL isn't always slower/inferior than NTSC, but I honestly don't care enough about the technical details to look up to what degree it matters. I mean...I can't tell significant difference in this video, but if you can then all the power to you I guess)


I'm a gamer AND a collector. I buy physically over digitally whenever possible. I'm rarely interested in AAA releases, but love indie games. I 'pirate' whatever titles I can for most of the systems I own, but will still buy them if I like them/can afford to.
For example; this weekend I went to a retro game market and picked up loose Japanese Gameboy carts for Parodius DA, Contra, and Serpent, a CiB copy of the European Road Rash 2 for Megadrive, and the most expensive item was a mint copy of the Japanese disc of Mars Matrix for Dreamcast. A couple of days later I received my 'day one' edition of the Yakuza Remastered collection for PS4. I've already spent many hours playing the retro games since buying them, while the PS4 title will probably remain sealed on my shelf for several weeks before I get around to even installing it.
Although I collect, I only collect games I'm going to play. And for the most part, when it comes to retro, I've always leant towards Japanese NTSC releases (even back when those systems were current rather than retro) despite living in a PAL territory.


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## izy (Feb 12, 2020)

Reynardine said:


> It's funny. I grew up with PAL SNES and (even worse) N64 and games like Super Mario 64 always had this floaty feeling to them. I thought that this is how it should be, I didn't know any better.



Umm hate to burst your bubble but super mario64 only runs at 30fps

And to burst it even more it runs better on pal than on stac
This is because it wasnt compiled with -02 optimizations on ntsc fornsome weird reason


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## Reynardine (Feb 12, 2020)

squee666 said:


> Umm hate to burst your bubble but super mario64 only runs at 30fps
> 
> And to burst it even more it runs better on pal than on stac
> This is because it wasnt compiled with -02 optimizations on ntsc fornsome weird reason


But nobody said anything about mario 64 running at more than 30fps. I was just mentioning speed differences, comparing my PAL N64 console to emulated NTSC games.

Both Mario 64 and the Zeldas run noticeably smoother in their NTSC versions, at least on emulator. Granted I have never played NTSC games on real hardware. I assumed that the speed difference would be the same.

Edit:
What is stac? First time I heard this term.


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## izy (Feb 12, 2020)

Reynardine said:


> But nobody said it would run at 60 fps. I was just talking about speed differences, comparing my PAL N64 console to emulated NTSC games.
> 
> Both Mario 64 and the Zeldas run noticeably smoother in their NTSC versions, at least on emulator. Granted I have never played NTSC games on real hardware. I assumed that the difference would be the same.
> 
> ...


Auto correct ntsc
And if you run them on emulator there will be noticeable performance increases

Like normally games would only run at 30fps and dip to 20

Emulation you are just removing any drops on frames and responsiveness unless you have trash hardware


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## Jokey_Carrot (Feb 12, 2020)

This is all true except for micro computers. Here in europe micro computers such as the ZX series Commodore 64 and amstrads were much more polular than game consoles as a result many games where developed to fit a 50hz system and some games run to fast on a 60hz machine or where never released in the US.


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## Reynardine (Feb 12, 2020)

squee666 said:


> Auto correct ntsc
> And if you run them on emulator there will be noticeable performance increases
> 
> Like of games would only run at 30fps and dip to 20
> ...


Does that mean that on real hardware there are no speed differences between pal and ntsc region N64 consoles?

I know about the recent Mario 64 decomp that resulted in a patch that fixes the slowdown around Bowser's sub etc. Was the pal version not affected by that oversight?

I had no idea, that's interesting.


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## izy (Feb 12, 2020)

There are basically no games that hit 60fps on n64 
So the 50hz vs 60hz makes no difference

And the s64 decomposed discovered that the ntsc version wasnt compiled with 02 optimizations which resulted in frame dips in certain areas.

The pal version doesnt suffer from this


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## Issac (Feb 12, 2020)

squee666 said:


> There are basically no games that hit 60fps on n64
> So the 50hz vs 60hz makes no difference
> 
> And the s64 decomposed discovered that the ntsc version wasnt compiled with 02 optimizations which resulted in frame dips in certain areas.
> ...


However, The PAL version of SM64 runs at 25FPS compared to the 30FPS that the NTSC version runs at. So there's still a difference. Not a 10 fps difference, but a 5 fps one.


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## Reynardine (Feb 12, 2020)

squee666 said:


> There are basically no games that hit 60fps on n64
> So the 50hz vs 60hz makes no difference
> 
> And the s64 decomposed discovered that the ntsc version wasnt compiled with 02 optimizations which resulted in frame dips in certain areas.
> ...


Haha, you made feel a bit better about playing on my pal console now!
I should hook it up again sometime...

Also, sorry if I derailed this thread with my questions.


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## Deleted User (Feb 12, 2020)

Skelletonike said:


> I never cared much. Even when I buy old games for my collection I always stick to the European copy of available. In most cases the difference is minimal.



Assuming you live in Portugal (hence the flag), it's not surprising you have to favor EUR versions over USA as importing every game would end up costing a lot. CeX opened various branches in Portugal so used gaming is a bit easier to buy than before (there was GAME, but they seem to have closed down and their prices were probably high as usual) as CeX tends to have decent prices.

In U.K., CeX Online can have really good deals that no one notices and that's a good thing for me.

By the way, the CeX in Forum Barreiro, Portugal is pretty darn good and clean. Haven't been to any others because they're either too far or don't have time when I'm there.


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## The Real Jdbye (Feb 12, 2020)

Boesy said:


> I used to collect PAL games of NES, SNES, N64, NGC, Wii, Xbox, PS1, PS2 but since I needed space I just sold them on eBay a few years ago and I'm okay with it considering the NTSC run at better performance than PAL copies do.
> 
> However, despite that PAL are a downgrade from NTSC their value remains the same as before, which is not surprising (it never lost its value). I reckon folks who're buying are collectors than to actually play it.
> 
> ...




That is true for N64/PSX and earlier, but GC games usually let you choose to run in PAL60 and Wii almost always support PAL60. Also, many people prefer playing games in their native language, and the PAL versions have more language options. Also, games only ran slower due to laziness where they didn't bother to optimize for both 50hz and 60hz. That's not a problem on GC and up, and not even a problem on every game on earlier consoles.


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## Deleted User (Feb 12, 2020)

The Real Jdbye said:


> That is true for N64/PSX and earlier, but GC games usually let you choose to run in PAL60 and Wii almost always support PAL60. Also, many people prefer playing games in their native language, and the PAL versions have more language options. Also, games only ran slower due to laziness where they didn't bother to optimize for both 50hz and 60hz. That's not a problem on GC and up, and not even a problem on every game on earlier consoles.


Some games on SNES PAL were optimized, but that wasn't the case for all, unfortunately. PAL games have the advantage of multiple languages whereas NTSC are generally just English or EN/ES/FR (for example).

Super Dragon Ball Z's PS2 PAL version features a 60 Hz option so if I play that, that's what I pick. And I prefer the PAL version of SDBZ because it features the Japanese audio with English subs, while the NTSC is English dub only.


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## duwen (Feb 13, 2020)

I did the multi-region switch mod for my Eur Megadrive, and while I generally run everything on the Japanese setting I'm often surprised by how many PAL titles run at the same speed regardless of the consoles settings. It seems that a lot of European and Japanese developed titles did bother with region optimisation, while NA developed titles are more likely to overlook any optimisation.


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## Deleted User (Feb 24, 2020)

This website has a list of PAL PS2 which say if it runs in 60 Hz or not — http://www.benoitren.be/60hz-palps2.html

There are games that oddly run somewhat faster in PAL than they do in NTSC.

Example #1: _Dragon Ball Z: Tenkaichi 3 (PS2)_


Example #2: _Super Mario World (SNES)_


Ultimately, I just go with NTSC-U/J copies to be assured it runs at the proper speed and I don't have to look it up if it does or doesn't.


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## LightBeam (Jan 17, 2022)

Some games would adapt their games to 50hz correctly and yeah sure you wouldn't be running at 60fps but 50fps but the game was still as fast as it should be
But it was easier to just run the games « worse » and it even made some people believe that europeans were « slower people » lmao


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## Jayro (Jan 17, 2022)

a 60Hz refresh rate hurts my eyes as it is... I couldn't imagine murdering them further with a 50Hz refresh rate.


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## delycache (Jan 26, 2022)

The main reason why I always — if possible — get PAL games is the multi-language support. Even though I have no problems with playing games in English, I prefer playing games in my mother tongue when the option is available.
Besides that, playing in 50Hz never bothered me and I never really noticed (apart from some rare cases where it’s really noticeable, Sonic the Hedgehog for example)


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