[thedeadfish]

No game was ever fully optimized for PAL because it is literally impossible. The only way to fix the squashed down graphics would be to completely re-scale all the art. This re-scaled art would no longer fit in the existing 8x8 tiles so you would then have to completely redo all the background and sprite mappings, you may have problems with overlapping parallax layers no longer lining up to whole tiles, and might have problems with video ram since the re-scale art now requires more memory. Basically a fully PAL optimized game would be pretty much a completely separate port built from the ground up.

[bennysomething]

But lots of games are successfully pal optimised. You are probably right, maybe it's easier to change resolution of 3d rendered games as it seems towards end of N64 is when optimisation started happening.