60Hz

I finally started using my UK Wii console yesterday and had a chance to see what was different to the Japanese version. Despite obvious language differences, the most glaring was the weather channel, which has been super-scaled-down from the Japanese version. The home page of it is sparse beyond belief and the symbols are just boring by comparison. You don't see today's high and low temperatures, you don't see precipitation percentage at a glance, you don't get a short description of the day's weather, just the icon and current temperature. Of course you can still click on the icon for a breakdown of the day's weather, but that was present in the Japanese version anyway.

Beyond the system software, as I jumped into Wii Sports I was horrified to see the flybys on Golf being incredibly jittery and not moving smoothly like they did before. If you live in Japan or America, you've probably never even heard of this problem, but the PAL TV standard here in the UK runs at 50Hz, while the NTSC TV format used in Japan and America runs at 60Hz. This being the case, games and console hardware are often designed to work at 60Hz so in order to keep the 50Hz TVs up to the same speed, frames have to be dropped. This is what gives the horrible jittery appearance, and in the days of previous generations, actually made games run slower. European fans of Final Fantasy VII may remember how the sound in summons such as Knights of the Round can become hugely out-of-sync with the images.

Thankfully though, the Wii has a built-in 60Hz option on the hardware for European machines. As mentioned though, this wasn't always the case, but the first console to stand up and make a difference in this area was the Sega Dreamcast. The 60Hz option had to be included in the game itself and was not a hardware option, but it was the first console to have games allowing this choice. The PS2 even now hardly ever includes this option. The only PS2 game I've ever seen with a 60Hz option is Rez, and that's published by Sega. Even some of the most recent games like Final Fantasy XII still do not include this vital option and it's only Sony that hasn't pushed this standard.

After the Dreamcast paved the way, others followed, with the Xbox being the first to include it as a hardware feature. Since then we have come to expect this option in European hardware and it's good to see that 50Hz is becoming less of an issue. Just remember how much us European gamers owe to Sega and their ill fated Dreamcast.