Being a European gamer in the 80s and 90s was tough

SantaC

SantaC

Member
Remember when Europe had to wait years for localizations? I think the best example of this was Super Mario Bros 3. A game with little to no text took three years to reach European market.

It would be a lot of time for a RPG, but it is a fucking platformer šŸ˜…

I was around back then and I remembering being very upset how Nintendo didnt give a fuck.
 
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SantaC said:
Remember when Europe had to wait years for localizations? I think the best example of this was Super Mario Bros 3. A game with little to no text took three years to reach European market.

It would be a lot of time for a RPG, but it is a fucking platformer šŸ˜…

I was around back then and I remembering being very upset how Nintendo didnt give a fuck.
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We didn't get Final Fantasy till VII. I remember reading about the SNES Final Fantasies, longing for them. But no. Nothing.

We did get the superior SNES version though, instead of that monstrosity released in the states.
 
FunkMiller said:
We will not talk about PAL 50hz.

WE WILL NOT TALK OF IT.
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But we knew no better back then...
So it didn't bother us.
I think it was the dreamcast when 60hz started to become the norm, as games gave you a choice (I didn't even know what it meant when starting shenmue and other games) one TV 60hz worked and another it didn't (we had 4 Dreamcasts in the house when I was young, between me and my siblings/dad)
 
I remember visiting my cousin in Ireland in the 80's and have a hardy laugh at his primitive game collection. I had games he'd never dreamed of,
 
50hz was fine, the problem was ports that didn't re-time to compensate for 60hz->50hz.

And Amiga was just better than anything if you wanted a full multimedia computer and its ability to game, create art and music etc.
 
SantaC said:
Remember when Europe had to wait years for localizations? I think the best example of this was Super Mario Bros 3. A game with little to no text took three years to reach European market.

It would be a lot of time for a RPG, but it is a fucking platformer šŸ˜…

I was around back then and I remembering being very upset how Nintendo didnt give a fuck.
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Its not like they translated the game to any other language than English. the game was released entirely in English here....
 
Everytime I see people posting about how good the virtual console service was on Wii I instantly know they are from the US.
 
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It wasn't so bad for Sega Master System users.

But yeah, it was bad otherwise.

I wasn't aware about how bad the 50hz problem was. I knew our games were slower but i only realized the extend of the issue in 1999, when i started fiddling with Emulators. I remember hearing the music in Sonic playing "too fast", thinking this is an emulator bug. I only realized how my life was a lie years later, while listening to game soundtracks on Youtube.

Nintendo bringing back the 50hz curse in their Virtual Console Wii service was what made me to never trust any similar emulation endeavors from official publishers.
 
I'd argue being a South American gamer was and is way worse. I never understood why folks in Europe relied so much on localizations back then. Just power through the game in japanese or english, back in the 8 and 16 bit days there weren't a lot of story heavy games anyway.

But yeah we didn't have to suffer 50hz games or censorship.
 
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DaleinCalgary said:
Was that because of 50 Hz tv's?
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PAL TV was ok, it was when the TV was 50htz only and when the games wasn't ported correctly and they slapped that 480 image on a 576 with black borders and off centred picture and was unoptimised for 50htz
When they was done properly they ran great and was higher resolution, kinda it was just the TV that was higher resolution not the game
Definitely a sharper picture though.
Now if I was to rate them.
a unoptimised PAL game is only worse the a NTSC game running a NTSC TV.
PAL 60htz TV's running a NTSC game looked better.
But an optimized game looked even better, but was restricted to 50htz.
Very few games had true optimization for PAL with added resolution being utilised
So a lot of them was like running a import on a 60htz PAL TV.
Outside of the the speed difference
You can tell the difference instantly by the thickness of the scanlines, a NTSC game would have thick scanlines while an optimized PAL game will have smaller less noticeable scanlines, more like a PC monitor
Really the problem was the mass use of NTSC.
 
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ACESHIGH said:
I'd argue being a South American gamer was and is way worse. I never understood why folks in Europe relied so much on localizations back then. Just power through the game in japanese or english, back in the 8 and 16 bit days there weren't a lot of story heavy games anyway.

But yeah we didn't have to suffer 50hz games or censorship.
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Because this was before internet became a thing and the consoles were region locked.
 
It was awesome thanks to SEGA.

Master System, MegaDrive, Game Gear, Mega-CD, Saturn.

All consoles had stellar support from SEGA Europe, proper RGB output with a true SCART lead in the boxes.
A ton of games for Master System specifically because it was successful in Europe, such as Power Strike II who is PAL optimized.
Pretty much all of SEGA first party games were PAL optimized on Saturn (and 32X).
Many games and translations in several languages, such as French, while Super Nintendo was missing pretty much all of its major RPGs in Europe.
 
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FunkMiller said:
We will not talk about PAL 50hz.

WE WILL NOT TALK OF IT.
Click to expand...
Pokemon Feels GIF
 
I remember we had to wait a long time for some consoles and games to be released in Europe. For example, we had to wait 2 months for Silent Hill 2 to be released in Europe.
Imagine Bloodborne 2 being released in Europe while the US has to wait 2 months for it to be available for them :messenger_grinning_smiling:
 
anthony2690 said:
But we knew no better back then...
So it didn't bother us.
I think it was the dreamcast when 60hz started to become the norm, as games gave you a choice (I didn't even know what it meant when starting shenmue and other games) one TV 60hz worked and another it didn't (we had 4 Dreamcasts in the house when I was young, between me and my siblings/dad)
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Damn, you and your family were half of the Dreamcast customer base!
 
The thing is, we didn't know; ignorance is bliss. There was no internet and social media at the time to tell us that a game exists in a distant country. The only source of information would be TV and magazines.
 
anthony2690 said:
But we knew no better back then...
So it didn't bother us.
I think it was the dreamcast when 60hz started to become the norm, as games gave you a choice (I didn't even know what it meant when starting shenmue and other games) one TV 60hz worked and another it didn't (we had 4 Dreamcasts in the house when I was young, between me and my siblings/dad)
Click to expand...
200.gif
 
anthony2690 said:
But we knew no better back then...
So it didn't bother us.
I think it was the dreamcast when 60hz started to become the norm, as games gave you a choice (I didn't even know what it meant when starting shenmue and other games) one TV 60hz worked and another it didn't (we had 4 Dreamcasts in the house when I was young, between me and my siblings/dad)
Click to expand...
Back then I had no idea the dreamcast even excisted. If I had known and seen the games, I definitly would've wanted one (but wouldn't have had the money to buy one).
 
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Cr1ptkeeper said:
Back then I had no idea the dreamcast even excisted. If I had known and seen the games, I definitly would've wanted one (but wouldn't have had the money to buy one).
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During the 90s we were big sega fans, we had psone and N64 too, but it started with master system in my household.

I still remember the day my dad came home with the sega Saturn with sega rally and virtua fighter 2, we was blown away! Honestly thought games would never look better at the time, as we had been playing megadrive earlier that day.

Never had a nes or snes though.
 
SantaC said:
Remember when Europe had to wait years for localizations? I think the best example of this was Super Mario Bros 3. A game with little to no text took three years to reach European market.

It would be a lot of time for a RPG, but it is a fucking platformer šŸ˜…

I was around back then and I remembering being very upset how Nintendo didnt give a fuck.
Click to expand...

It was delayed becuse of a chip shortage, they wanted to make sure they had enough to supply the US first before running a big ad campaign in Europe and failing to have enough units available.
 
My only problem by being an european gamer was that all games available here as a kid was all in english when thats not my native language. Only when i was a teen and played FF7 with a english dictionary by my side to help me understand better the story, my english started improving. Even my english grades in school changed from negatives to always positives. So thanks Final Fantasy. :D

One of the reasons Sony is King in my contry is that all 1st party Sony games have option for Portuguese dub and subtitles. While i dont need it and enjoy more the games with the original voices, it helps alot young gamers enjoy they games.
 
it was too bad that almost noone optimised correctly for PAL.

PAL was the better standard by far, but the fact that most of the world used NTSC really hurt it in the gaming department
 
I didn't play SNES games at the time so didn't really affect me, did many PS1 games take advantage of the increased resolution of PAL?
 
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Kuranghi said:
I didn't play SNES games at the time so didn't really affect me, did many PS1 games take advantage of the increased resolution of PAL?
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it was arguably even worse on PS1/N64 because more games ran at 30fps or even 20fps, which then translated to 25fps/17fps on PAL
 
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ACESHIGH said:
I never understood why folks in Europe relied so much on localizations back then. Just power through the game in japanese or english, back in the 8 and 16 bit days there weren't a lot of story heavy games anyway.
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Both Japan and the US used NTSC. Their games straight up didn't run on PAL consoles.
 
01011001 said:
it was only when PAL60 started to ve supported on the Dreamcast/PS2/GC/Xbox generation that it slowly got better
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If iirc my Xbox + X2VGA shined with PAL60 modes, if they didn't have 720p or 1080i output modes those extra pixels were a godsend on my monitor. I remember bringing stoners round to play games on my X2VGA + 5.1 setup (with 10" subwoofer) and then being (extra) blown away by the experience ha.

Not really related but I still remember Hulk: Ultimate Destruction looking so clean in 720p and I believe one of the Gran Turismos had a 1080i output mode on PS2 but maybe only for replays or something like that.
 
Kuranghi said:
If iirc my Xbox + X2VGA shined with PAL60 modes, if they didn't have 720p or 1080i output modes those extra pixels were a godsend on my monitor. I remember bringing stoners round to play games on my X2VGA + 5.1 setup (with 10" subwoofer) and then being (extra) blown away by the experience ha.

Not really related but I still remember Hulk: Ultimate Destruction looking so clean in 720p and I believe one of the Gran Turismos had a 1080i output mode on PS2 but maybe only for replays or something like that.
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the 1080i output mode for GT ran internally at 576x960 and then was streched horizontally to 1728x960, that didn't look that great to my knowledge
 
In a dark period of my life I was using a screwdriver on a cassette deck to try and get a Spectrum 48k game to load. That's why I laugh sagely when gamers argue about the slightest of things.
 
01011001 said:
the 1080i output mode for GT ran internally at 576x960 and then was streched horizontally to 1728x960, that didn't look that great to my knowledge
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Yeah I didnt try it, that sounds awful. I was happy to get progressive instead of interlaced on almost all games at least regardless of whether it had a higher res mode.
 
The res and framerates were still there as it is now. 576 vs 480 I/P 50 vs 60 hz.

I'm glad it's uniform now sort of.
 
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JimmyRustler said:
Damn, Onimusha, FFX and RE CV come to mind. How amazing was it to play these games later in full speed instead of slow motion. šŸ˜‚
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Hell yeah, I remember playing the first Devil May Cry in 50hz, every review I've read at the time pointed out it was a shame the game got butchered by the PAL 50hz, I've finished it like that at the time, years later when playing it the first time in 60hz I was shocked! Then Virtua Fighter 4 EVO in 50hz too, it's unbearable for Virtua Fighter, they literally fucking float in the air when you launch them for a combo like ultra slowdown near bullet time max payne kind of slow, it's awfully bad! (Edit: my TV didn't had 60hz option at the time, not VF fault! It featured both options)
 
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Got Golden Eye 64 as usa import, 140 euros šŸ¤£ before that I imported megaman Gameboy games 3 -4, GB was region free, good times
 
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