[simias]

You have more lines with PAL but in practice since most of the game devs were either in Japan or in the US (with a few notable exceptions) most games were designed for NTSC and many didn't bother to increase the resolution when porting to PAL. Furthermore many games refreshed the display at half the video framerate so you end up with 25fps on PAL.

So in many cases you end up with games that run at 5/6th the nominal speed and have black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. PAL gaming was pretty crap, but of course at the time I didn't know any better and I didn't understand english anyway, so it's not like I had a choice...