I hate region locking.  I don't even understand the reasoning behind it.  Of course i don't understand teh tech behind it either.

I'd say the main reasoing behind region locking is to avoid sales being taken away from each respective country, however, I think that they are losing way more money and customers that way, because of the simplicity of adding modchips, which is happening a lot with the rightfully impatient PAL owners

Why does the UK, the third largest single nation market in the world always get lumped in with the rest of Europe? We spawned the fucking American language

Pretty much every last UK television supports NTSC because American companies kept fucking us over and the demand was there.

PAL compliance was often achieved in the past by adding huge boarders (to account for the resolution difference) but then also slowing the fucking games down. They never spent effort porting in the past in any case. I know this for sure because the one company who bothered (Rareware: being British) made their games run full screen, full speed, no hits.

3D rasterisation can be readily rendered to different resolutions by changing the render settings (the framerate must proportionally scale, as equally happens with the50/60Hz shift), and engines are designed to have scalable framerates in any case, meaning all 3D games should be highly portable to different video outputs (NTSC and PAL are both interlaced, so image patterns aren't a big problem).  

Several of the newer GC and Wii games have been 60Hz ONLY, mandating NTSC compliant TVs to play them.

We pay a shit ton more than you, we can at least expect a timely release.

I'm suprised nobody has mentioned Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, which Europe is still waiting for after approx 19 months. As for other games, I have been told that Final Fantasy 5 and 6 will never be released here because, "It's too late. The GBA is officially dead here".

Seriously, it was an excuse a decade ago that they would have to rework through a game in order to change the resolution to PAL, but it shouldn't be so much of a big deal now. Hell, I'm in Australia and I'm running 480p. Modding has come up as a very serious thought.

 You are pretty much right in regards to why regioning exists. It allows them to sell games at varying prices that the markets will support, thus maximising their profits. Fortunately, thanks to the ACCC here in Australia, this is viewed as a restriction of trade, hence why modchips are legal if they make a console region free, and why importers here can't be threatened by similar actions that Sony took against Lik-sang.

Nintendo is singled out because they are the worst of the three. PS3 is region free, so I don't see why any Sony fans can be complaining on that, if a game is late for you, you can just import it (and end up paying half the price)

Nintendo have always treated Europe and Australia as third class countries and it has meant that historically they perform badly there. Hopefully things start getting better soon, we were the second country after Japan to get the DS Lite, I thought that was a signal that Nintendo would start giving us a better time of it but I was clearly wrong...

I also thought I would point out our consumer commission found that region locking is in fact illegal in Australia. All products need to be region free or have the ability to be made region free. I wonder how Nintendo is getting around that particular problem.

I would just like to confirm since i live in New Zealand that all the comercial, legal video games at the local EB or Gamestop are all English and PAL (which is a pain) and it does frustrate me that they cant aleast release games the same time as US considiring English is the only language you can get video games here.

really? then do we get black bars and games running slowly on our virtual console?

My friend spent $15 to purchase Ocarina of Time, a game which I recommended, and it's almost unplayable as it feels like Link is running through Jelly 

 I guess thats why some of my games in my gaming libary actualy can only be played on a 60 Hz tv...I don't care why we don't get the games in time but when we pay almost 70 USD for a game before VAT I think that we could get some games in time. Devlope the 50 Hz on the same time then!