Before the decision was made to leave America, I knew that I'd have to start to think about what it meant to be living in a PAL territory versus the all-powerful NTSC state of the U.S. During the '90s when I was a big import gamer, I remember being appalled by the length of time it took for simple ports of SNES and Megadrive (Sega Genesis) games to come from Japan, to the U.S., and then to Europe. In fact, sometimes, the games I coveted the most were upwards of 6-12 months behind North America, and indeed, sometimes they never got released at all in Europe.
Upon my arrival in the States in 1998, I remember feeling utterly liberated that I could stroll into a consumer electronics store and walk out again with the very latest Nintendo 64 game (GoldenEye 64 was my first victim). In the past, I'd put up with extortionate import prices for Japanese versions of Super Mario 64 and Wave Race 64; each costing me upwards of $120 a pop. And don't even get me started about the $150 I dropped for a U.S. NTSC copy of Street Fighter II for the SNES.
My weapon of choice in the early 1990s.
Suffice it to say, I only had those old faded memories of what life as a UK console gamer used to be like to rely on, so my nerves were a little worse for wear. Now I've been back in England for close to two weeks, and I'm very pleased to report that things are not anywhere near as bad as I had first believed.
These days, most every reasonably high-profile videogame hits the UK at either exactly the same time or only a few days after it's available in the U.S. There are some exceptions where three or four weeks are closer to the truth, but to cite a couple of recent examples, Street Fighter IV, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. and Resident Evil 5 were all sitting on the shelves at my local Tesco supermarket at around the same time that U.S. GameStop and EB stores were offering up the same goods.
It was most refreshing to feel as though I wasn't on the ass-end of gaming all over again. But there are still a number of niggles and issues that are bugging me. All of my console hardware is NTSC. I own three Xbox 360s, one PlayStation 3, one PSP, two DS Lites and one rarely-used Wii. Want to know which is the winner over here in the UK? It's actually the PlayStation 3. Yep, Sony saw fit to install universal power supplies in the PlayStation 3 and although the label on the back of the unit tells me it's 60Hz and 100-120V only, some quick research online gave me the confidence to jam a three-pronged UK electric kettle cable into the back of the PS3 and plug it into the house's 50Hz 240V power sockets. Bingo. It boots up perfectly with no need for clunky, expensive step-down transformers to regulate the power flowing to the hardware.
