I'll start this off by saying that I know little of the nuts and bolts of screens and definitions etc. When my more tech savvy friends start with their hd-1080p-whatever-the-fuck talk I tend to space out and think about butterflies and how they should be called flutterby's and how they will bring doom to us all.
The little I do know stretches about as far as knowing that PAL sucks filthy pleb dick for booze money. I may be mistaken, and if I am please feel free to correct me (I can't be arsed researching it), but NTSC display is meant to be better in the first place. But fine, Europe (and that still, mystifyingly, includes Australia) had a different system from the get go, sure, great, whatever.
That was fine a whiles back when all we got here were PAL tv's, but these days every goddamn one has NTSC support, even the shitty cheap one I recently bought.
Which brings me to my question of WHY IN THE MOTHERFUCKING HELL are games still zoned to PAL when they could all be bloody NTSC and I wouldn't have to wait for goddamn Smash Brothers. PAL is gone it lost the...whatever-the-fuck war and NTSC is king and we can all play games for it.
But no, now I gotta wait longer while the NTSC region gets it and starts playing which'll suck cause then they'll have a load of practise in and by the time I take my Wii out for some well supervised online fun I'll be getting bitchslapped back and forth by some bastard 13 year old American kid. And he'll probably have a bunch of stupid net acronyms as his little comment things and he'll tease me so at my lack of skills and I'll say I've only just got it and he will simply mock me further. God I hate him. Goddamn PAL bullshit. Fucking flutterby's.
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PAL actually isnt bad, and in some ways is better than NTSC, mostly in the aspect of color reproduction in TV broadcasts. NTSC is also a much much older system than PAL is. Also, both standards are analog signals. There are two new systems for digital broadcasting, which are much different than NTSC and PAL (ATSC for North America and DVB for nearly the rest of the world.)
It's interesting to hear about the new digital standards but it is baffling that there is going to be two as opposed to a global standard.
And I do so loathe region locking.
At least the same proportion of the world uses PAL than any other format (let's just not talk about SECAM. Just... no.) so if the world was going to change formats, I'd definitely suggest changing to the better one.
Not that most TVs can't do both now anyway. And the signals that come in are mostly digital now (and will be fully digital sooner than I care to think). And that the game zoning has nothing to do with either of these things. Eh, what was I saying again?
PAL has more horizontal lines than NTSC, hence a higher resolution and a better picture overall.
There was never a format war between NTSC and PAL, as there had been between Betamax and VHS, or Blueray and HD-DVD.
Most console games are developed in NTSC territories, and rather than reprogramming the graphics engine to expand the view to PAL, they simply leave black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and drop the framerate from 60 Hz to 50 Hz, so the game runs slower as well.
Since the PS2 and XBox, most PAL releases allow you to run in PAL-60 mode, which will use the entire screen... which can look bad with pixel based art (2D graphics) but looks fine with 3D graphics.
NTSC is NOT intrinsically better than PAL; have look at a high definition TV or a computer monitor, then look at a television -- you will realize the only reason PAL/NTSC are still around is because they are so cheap;
For the record, I can't afford a big-screen HDTV either... it's still a $4000 ticket to get in.
None of the people in my family do either, and they all have their own homes and full-time jobs.
I don't know what I will do when the new Hi-Def Street Fighters come out... :-(