It was? Odd, I wonder why...

I think it's because TVs in Europe have different refresh rates or something like that. :dry:

US tv formats run at a 60hz refresh rate(NTSC)
Europe runs at a 50hz refresh rate(PAL)

This means that the systems over in europe have to be designed to run at the lower refresh rate which based on the ending of this video meant that the games ran slower due to a slower refresh rate. Probably still do I guess.

Well, they didn't release the real Super Mario Bros. 2 here in the U.S. till years after it was made because they felt it would be too hard for us. Maybe Sega had a similar thought about Sonic in Europe, but just slowed it down to compensate instead of not releasing it.

Every TV in Europe has a refresh rate of 50 Hz, but newer ones are made with an optional 60 Hz mode, whereas American TVs all have a refresh rate of 60 Hz. Usually this means games run slower in Europe, but SEGA actually took better care to modify their games to run just as fast in Europe than Nintendo did, which is where the notion that Nintendo hates Europe comes from.

Yeah, the 50hz refresh rate is kinda sad when you consider the part about average human perception being about 60 frames per second.

The difference of refresh rate really shouldn't have made much of an impact on the gameplayer, though. I guess they just did a really sucktastic job importing it.

Interestingly enough, I was watching the NC's review of the Sonic series' when this popped up in the new vid side bar. Timing.

NC did a rewiev of all the sonic games? :0

So when they said only the Genesis had blast processing, they meant the Mega Drive didn't have it either.

The Nintendo's didn't have it any better

Im from teh UK myself and can say that all games during this era of video games (from generation 1 to Generation 5 aka Sega Saturn, N64 and PS1 were slow like this at 50 fps, including games like Mario 64 and even Sonic 3 & Knuckles)

it was when the Previous Generations of Consoles came out that games in europe were at normal speed as they were in Japan and US

Wow...I had no idea... :0

Its cause you cannot directly translate NTSC (the US and Japan TV format) Directly to PAL (the Euro TV format) without major eff-ups in the process.

I hear tell FF7 had some major screw-ups in Europe as well. Course, they could have just adjusted these games to accommodate the different format, but that would have been work, and really, who wants to do their job when half-assing it is so much easier?

Games running 20% slower is due to crappy PAL conversions running in 50hz :( Nearly all games before PS2 gen were like this... What's even more annoying is that Nintendo is still doing it with their Virtual Console thing, I bought Ocarina of Time and thought it was a joke :X

In all honesty, I wouldn't even have noticed it ^^; But I guess back in the early days we kept playing it cause gaming was just "wow-ing" us into submission wether we wanted or not :p Thanks for the clear up to Benzaie and all of yas who commented.

The first Sonic was really slow in Europe. Sonic 2 and 3 were faster but not the same speed you guys had in the U.S. Stupid PAL T.Vs!

The slowing to 50fps in PAL regions is just stupid.

Though if you want disorienting and weird, then play a game in 50fps while watching a video of it in 60fps.

sonic may have been slow, but the game was still the fucking shit back then

There's no doubt that the first Sonic was awesome. However this...wow. Ben, I had no idea how slow it was until I saw this game. Funny reaction, dude!

I feel sad for you europeople

'Symphony of the Night' on the PAL PSX had that effect on me too. It played basically like a squashed Castlevania in space.

I'm glad those times are over, since almost any TV here can handle 60Hz now... but then again Sega pulls of things like the PAL-Port of 'MadWorld', reminding us of a simpler time.

Wow, i never knew we had a sucky version, presumably my versions on PSP and 360 are improved...i should do a comparison one of these days

dragondude wrote:

oh another thing I forgot to say its a game enjoy it bitch :!:

That is the last thing that you'll say.

wow...you don't mess around
how many banned so far?
oh yeah, and i was skeptical at first but now I like it
great job

I understand that PAL screens have more horizontal lines than NTSC TVs so the only way to avoid having the framerate drop was to add dirty black borders to the top and bottom of the screens like most PAL SNES games had (Mario Kart, for example). Sonic is one of those rare games where the borders would have been welcome to get the speed up! The first time I played Sonic 1 on the GameCube I thought "holy crap, this is fast!" The other Megadrive Sonics didn't seem to have this problem, so I assume they fixed it- can't remember if they added borders or not.

It might play slower on the PS2 versions and on an emulator (if it's the European version that is being played) but I have the original for the UK Sega Megadrive and it runs a lot fast than this.

Oh god, they couldn't even translate the music right. I wonder how F-Zero, the fastest game ever, was translated to Europe.

Obviously humor of any sort goes WAAAAAAY over your head. I doubt Benzaie needs a foul mouthed 13 year-old telling him how to play games.

Edit: Guess admin agrees with that.

Anyways, funny vid Benzaie, and sorry PAL releases sucked so badly back then.

I didn't even think about playing Sonic on a PAL system, that had to be just...ouch!

This is the only 5 second video from benzaie that made me laugh. The execution was great.

Why did they have to half-assed such a great game? I'm sure the effort would have been worth it. =P

Then again, I don't know crap about NTSC-PAL conversion.

It looks more like he's not using a PAL ROM, but slowing down an NTSC one.. Which is probably partly why the musics messed up. (Least that's how it looks with the counter in the corner. :P )

Then again I don't remember if the music and things were that slow when I played it or not... :unsure:

Oh well... To make things worse they released it at 50HZ on the VC here. ¬¬;

Edit: I just noticed the boarders come up... Bleh. Stupid PAL... Stupid Nintendo releasing VC games in 50HZ.. :( So yeah, I was wrong about it just being an NTSC rom slowed down..
PAL sucks. >.>; Why do they still force us to use it with the old games. D: Can't they make it PAL60 or something now. >.>;

Thank christ for sonic mega collection

It saved us all from slow hedgehogs, and gave us the true unnaturally fast version

Back then, we, on europe, didn't care about that, well we didn't know about it. Without Internet and Video footage, how should we know that the NTSC version is faster then the PAL version (we didn't even know that there could be a difference between countrys, and I don't think any Kid would care much about it)

And when anyone told us, "Hey the US Version is way faster!" we couldn't imagine anything about that.

In the imagination of a Kid, when you talk about faster, the Kid thinks of triple speed or somethin like that, not that there are 10 Frames more per second.

God damn, that's insane. Even the music sounded slower.