The PAL region (PAL being short for Phase Alternating Line) is a television publication territory that covers most of Asia, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and most of Western Europe. It is so named because of the PAL television standard traditionally used in those regions, as opposed to the NTSC standard traditionally used in the United States and Japan, which both produce a large portion of the world's televisions.
Most video games designated as part of the region will not play on NTSC-U/C or NTSC-J region consoles because of regional lockout. While this is the most common occurrence, some Xbox and Xbox 360 games are region-free encoded, since Microsoft's policy is for publishers to decide. Sony has a similar policy for the PlayStation Portable, but most publishers choose not to encode a region on their UMD games. PlayStation 3 Blu-ray Disc games are region-free. All Nintendo home consoles have region locking either by software encoding or physical differences in media and consoles. Nintendo handhelds are region-free, along with most other historical systems (Neo Geo Pocket, Sega Game Gear, etc.), except partially for the Nintendo DSi and fully for the Nintendo 3DS which features region locking for the DSi and 3DS specific software respectively (for example, DSiWare games and apps).
Australia uses PAL version games only for the Wii, PlayStation 3 and sometimes the Xbox 360. Nintendo DS games in Australia use either their own localizations or localizations from North America to reduce release date delays on games, but some distributors use European versions as they are fully aligned to a certain European subsidiary e.g. Konami and Capcom of Europe for unknown reasons.
As most hand-held consoles use their own proprietary display system, incompatibilities of differing TV systems are not relevant. However, the same regions often exist for localisation and distribution purposes.
Read more about PAL Region: Release Area, 60 Hz Operation, Criticism of PAL Region Video Games
Famous quotes containing the words pal and/or region:
“The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds, and sometimes he needs somebody, his pal or his mother or his wife or God, to give him that confidence. He’s got to have some inner standards worth fighting for or there won’t be any way to bring him into conflict. And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it. That’s all there is to it.”
—Clark Gable (1901–1960)
“Alvina felt herself swept ... into a dusky region where men had dark faces and translucent yellow eyes, where all speech was foreign, and life was not her life. It was as if she had fallen from her own world on to another, darker star, where meanings were all changed.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)