UK Virtual Console games have borders! - Screens inside

December 6th, 2006, 19:00 Posted By: wraggster

via cvg

In preparation for the European launch this Friday, the UK version of the Wii Virtual Console has just gone live, and blighty gamers will be disappointed to hear that some downloadable retro games suffer from black borders and significantly slower game speed than their US equivalents.

Among the games reported to suffer from poor PAL ports on the UK Virtual Console are Sonic the Hedgehog and F-Zero.

We tested Sonic on our PAL system and low and behold the game does indeed sport a pair of black borders along the top and bottom of the screen, but even more worrying is that the PAL version of the game runs significantly slower than the US equivalent, somewhat hampering its speedy platforming gameplay.

For anyone young enough not to remember, this is down to 1980s Japanese and American game designers' failure to accommodate the extra 100 lines of the PAL display signal, resulting in a squashed and bordered view. Back before the days of 60hz options, the slower scan rate of the European TV system also resulted in slower-running games.

Bizarrely we also tried out Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario 64 - a game that suffered from a terrible PAL port - on our UK Wii, and they both matched the US Virtual Console versions with no borders and smooth-running gameplay.

When we contacted Nintendo UK regarding the issue it was unfortunately unavailable for comment, but we'll let you know when they get back to us.

UPDATE: You can now see Sonic's borders for yourself in our screen and Mario's full-screen conversion as well (ignore the dodgy Mac button).

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