As the new PlayStation Plus service Launches around the world, people have reportedly discovered a major downside to subscription classic games: Many of them use versions released in PAL regions rather than the NTSC versions that many of us are familiar with.
The news first surfaced this afternoon thanks to Twitter user The_Marmolade booting up monkey escape for a nap just to find the game ran at the lower frame rate PAL versions inherent.
Some replies suggested that this might have been because The_Marmolade was purchased monkey escape through the PlayStation Store in Indonesia (a PAL region); However, examining the URL product codes on the Taiwanese PlayStation Store revealed that Taiwan (an NTSC region) received the exact same PAL version as Indonesia. His results indicated that the whole world would get PAL versions, a worrying thought for anyone who wants to play these classics as intended.
PlayStation didn’t respond immediately my box‘s request for comment.
Without getting too technical, PAL refers to an encoding method used across Europe and other parts of the world that outputs video at 25 frames per second. NTSC, which is more common in countries like the United States and Japan, runs at about 30 frames per second. Both have their merits, but when it comes to gaming, unsurprisingly, gamers prefer NTSC’s smoother frame rate.
VGC recently confirmed that every first-party game in the old-school series of PlayStation Plus (monkey escape, Hot Shots Golf, Jumping Lightning!, etc.) uses the largely inferior PAL versions, but third-party games are more of a toss-up. Bandai Namcos Tekken 2for example, NTSC is what should please those fighting game players who need better frame rates to perform while Team17 Digital’s Worms Armageddon gets stuck at PAL.
And this isn’t the first time Sony has done so. The old-school offerings of the PlayStation classic followed a similarly inexplicable pattern. Although almost half of the games on the nostalgia-baiting novelty console ran in PAL format, there was no rhyme or reason. In fact, the PlayStation Classic versions are from wild arms
I’m generally pretty easygoing about framerates, but I’m a lot less forgiving when it comes to preserving classic games through re-releases. It’s baffling that Sony would do this again. Hell, even Nintendo gives players the option to switch between NTSC and PAL in their classic Nintendo Switch Online games. If you’re a company that’s really serious about fighting emulation and giving people legal ways to play old video games, this isn’t the way to go.
