I think it would be cool to have a thread where people from Europe / the EU can hang out in!
The majority of the server seems to be based in America, so a lot of stuff that’s being sold in the SALE thread is just too expensive to ship from US to Europe (especially with customs) and most conferences/meetups are too far away to feasibly visit… so if anyone is selling something we can do it in here. Or if someone’s planning to visit a conference we can talk about it in here. Maybe we could also talk about the video game industry and highlight games from our respective countries!
The most prominent game to come out of Austria in recent years was that Dungeons of Hinterberg. I was pretty delighted to see it get some international converage, even if it’s not really my type of game. Aside from that I feel like our video game scene is a little dire unfortunately.
But there’s this (free) conference in Vienna next month that I’m looking forward to attend:
I have a very big blind spot when it comes differences between european vs US game versions. Back when games were more region specific I wasn’t yet online that much so the european version is just “the version” for me. I regularly find myself baffled that certain stuff was different in the US even 25 years later. Looking forward to seeing lots of that in here. I do hope that Brandon does not declare war on us again for being different though.
I have very fond memories of german games I played as a kid. I might write something up on a couple of them. I actually reminisced about Vampires Dawn in the Games you’re thinking about playing thread a couple of days ago. And I’m still tempted to revisit it.
As for more recent stuff I feel like some cool indie releases came out of here. Signalis (which I love), Chained Echoes (which I haven’t yet played), Cross Code (which I also like but didn’t finish for some reason). On the more higher budget side it’s looking a little less stellar. I’m a fan of and regularly lose a lot of time to Egosoft’s X games. Though I just saw yesterday that they used AI generated voice acting in the newest DLC for X4 which makes me really sad.
Hamburg, the city I live in, actually is home to quite a few game studios though unfortunately the majority of them make cash grabby mobile and browser games and generally behave in horrible ways like firing employees who try to unionize or organize in different ways to fight for their rights as employees. I haven’t really been in touch with the local video game dev scene outside of being a consumer. I went to Gamescom like 15 years ago but that’s about it. I’m thinking about getting more involved though.
It’s hitting me that I’ve perhaps never really had the European Experience™, despite living here in Sweden for most of my life… My first home console was a Wii, and I believe the only 50 Hz PAL console I’ve ever had might be a SNES for which I scrounged together the money at age 11–12 or so – and I must’ve played slower versions of a number of games… but despite discovering emulators before that – on which lord knows whether I played the (E) or the (U) ROMs (who was to say what those letters meant back then anyway) – I don’t recall ever perceiving a difference.
Is this what truly decides whether one is a millennial or a zoomer?
Here’s a classic. Won’t be able to talk much about meetups, but as another 50hz region dweller I’m sure there’s much to discuss… like letterboxed frames.
Went out of my way to rip and upload the Puzzle Mode music from the Mega Drive version of Pac-Panic just so you people could hear it in all its 50hz glory. This is the ideal way to experience the game!
I don’t think this is uncommon though. Most people probably don’t perceive the difference between PAL and NTSC in any remarkable way, especially not in how we remember the games. It’s usually only when directly compared and differences being highlighted where people become aware of it – and then people will find one weird over the other most likely based on what they’re used to.
I’ve become pretty convinced that if you gave a 50hz game to someone they’ll probably won’t notice. At least not for later releases when the difference in Hz were better accounted for. Music is most likely the most noticeable thing, but even that is addressed in most games at one point and don’t have slowed down music and sound.
Certainly accurate. I grew up with NTSC but live now in a PAL region and regularly play much older PAL games or watch my partner play them. Music is always what stands out to me on older games.
There are some fun side-effects that can be seen when using one of those devices meant to play NTSC games on PAL and vice-versa, like bizarre textbox behavior and misaligned music. Fun stuff!
As a PALer growing up, I’m surprised no one has brought up the huge borders on the screen when playing games! I remember getting into importing in the 90s and while everything was faster, the biggest thing for me was it wasn’t widescreen anymore!
Granted nowadays with emulation that has gone but when you were living it, it was huge!
I found a cool website that has many old German gaming magazines available to download!
I was going through some and it’s nuts that they were showing ads that were straight up selling Nazi and porn phone wall papers. I assume they weren’t able to do that in US magazines lol?? Especially in magazines primarily marketed towards teens.
Seeing KH2 at 69.95€, it’s also striking to see how video game pricing has really not gone up in almost 20 years despite so much inflation (ignoring microtransactions)
On that note, here’s some scans for Swedish Super Play if anyone wants to take a look. The guy is still in the process of scanning and uploading issues on his free time, so it’s taking a while for new ones to be published. But it’s a neat collection.
It’s a general explanation of how the game works. Based on having seen the Action Button review a couple times it seems to be on point, but I could be wrong. The article was written by a woman too.
I’m from Australia rather than Europe but we were PAL as well so I hope I’m welcome here. I still play games at 50Hz sometimes, particularly the master system games I grew up on, many of which only actually came out in PAL territories and might have been optimised accordingly. Often there’s less slowdown on PAL games because the system has slightly longer to process each frame. From memory this is fairly easily seen in Sonic 1 SMS.
I just happen to have images from Psychic World for SMS:
This is running on a PAL mega drive.
And this is on a nomad (60Hz)
I’m not sure if the speed differences are from the GIFs (PAL actually seems to be running faster to my eye), but check out the flicker on the power up. Why is it like that? Who knows.
Something I’ve noticed here is that the retro scene is pretty US-influenced - much less SMS than I remember, and more NES. We had both, but I don’t think the competition was nearly so one-sided as in NTSC territories. And I’m sure we all said “Ness” and “Sness” and “See-ga”. I’m sure they were there but I don’t remember borders above and below games being an issue. Or ever seeing scanlines, maybe because of the higher vertical resolution of PAL putting the lines closer together (and the general tinyness of TVs back then). I noticed recently I get a little flicker near the top of the screen running PAL games on my Mega SG - turns out the console runs them at 50Hz but will only put out a 60Hz signal to the TV so there’s artefact. Sort of similarly, the MiSTer SMS core in PAL mode used to run as an NTSC machine with a region mod rather than an actual PAL machine, so the clock frequency was slightly off, though that was corrected years ago. I feel it reflects a lower prioritisation of the PAL legacy. Which is fine, it’s a very niche complaint that few would notice.
