A lot of our readers, if not most of them, probably don’t remember the dark ages of the PAL standards for European territories. Back in the day, unlike North America and Japan, Europe used the PAL standard for its displays—which meant that the image refreshed at a frequency of 50 Hz rather than 60 Hz, and the images were lower resolution.
When it came to video games, especially, this caused all sorts of problems. Poor PAL conversions would often lead to letterboxed games with warped resolution, and a slower pace, with detectable input lag, as well as music that was out of synch with images. Which is the reason why, whenever a classic game is re-released, most of the times people explicitly do not want it to be the PAL version, but rather the NTSC one.
However, Sony’s PlayStation Classic, which already has a litany of disappointments for those hoping it would be a celebration of the brand’s heritage, much like the NES Classic Mini and the SNES Classic Mini were, seems to ignore this reality entirely. Rather, according to Sony’s own post on the PlayStation Blog, a full 9 games on the micro console—which is almost half the 20 that come on board—will be PAL versions, running at 50 Hz. This includes games like Tekken 3, which is a fighting game, and is frame sensitive when it comes to input. Bafflingly enough, the PAL versions won’t be exclusive to the European release either, unlike what was previously assumed, and will instead be in every western version of the console.
With every new bit of news that comes out about it, the PlayStation Classic sounds worse and worse. You can see the full list of PAL games below:
- Battle Arena Toshinden
- Cool Boarders 2
- Destruction Derby
- Grand Theft Auto
- Jumping Flash!
- Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
- Resident Evil Director’s Cut
- Tekken 3
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
