PS1 games included in the new PlayStation Plus Premium will soon be available for download in PAL 50 Hz or NTSC 60 Hz versions, Sony announces. Something to delight purists, who will dodge bad PAL conversions.
The new PlayStation Plus is available from today (June 23, 2022) in Europe and Oceania. Players from both continents were obviously quick to scrutinize the catalog of games, especially the retro selection, offered to them. Among the most pressing questions were which versions of PlayStation 1 games would be included; unsurprisingly, for these two territories which had formerly adopted the PAL video standard, the vast majority of these are 50 Hz versions. But this limitation will fortunately be short-lived: Sony split a tweet this morning promising that gamers will soon be able to access both PAL and NTSC 60Hz versions of games at their convenience.
We plan to deploy NTSC options for a majority of Classic games offered in
PlayStation Plus Premium and Deluxe offers in Asia, Europe, India, South Africa, Australia,
New Zealand and the Middle East. More info on PS Plus: https://t.co/kBBKpbcaMO— PlayStation France (@PlayStationFR) June 23, 2022
These 50 Hz versions of games in the PS1 catalog were the target of one of the main criticisms that targeted the new PlayStation when it was released a few weeks ago in Asian territories outside of Japan. They pose a double technical problem: some of these versions are only bad conversions of the original NTSC 60 Hz versions, resulting in a crushed image ratio (due to the passage of a video signal over 480 lines to a signal 576 lines), and offer a very noticeably slowed down animation; on the other hand, the PS5 not being able to produce a video signal at 50 Hz, it packs these 50 frames per second on a 60 Hz signal, which produces jerks and/or a splitting of the image.
In America, on the other hand, PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers were delighted to find that they were entitled to 60 Hz versions of the games – of course triggering the jealousy of players from other continents. Sony’s choice to offer the PAL versions is no doubt explained by localization requirements: these versions are indeed often the only ones to offer multiple languages in play, in particular the famous “EFIGS” (English, French, Italian, German , Spanish) must-haves in Europe.