Retro Gaming Australia

The range of PSone Classics available on the PAL PlayStation Stores has been nothing short of shameful. It’s mainly due to rights issues caused by major publishers not having a PAL region presence during the 32-bit era, or at least that’s what I’ve been led to believe in the past.

Anyway, it seems like that’s all about to change according to the PlayStation Blog. They announced today that NTSC-U and NTSC-J PSone Classics will be made available for release on the PAL stores. No titles, dates or prices have been announced yet.

Basically what that means now is that if a title is cleared for release on either the JP or the US store, SCEE can put it up unaltered for release on their stores unaltered – so long as they are approved by the ratings boards. They won’t have to be resubmitted for approval by SCEE (but they do have to be tested, so titles won’t be posted day and date with their US or JP releases), unless they actually want to release the PAL version.

More importantly, all of those games will run in 60Hz – no more paying extra for shitty slow and bordered PAL versions. If only Nintendo did the same.

Of course, anything held back by expired licenses is still not going to appear.