One of the British institutions that I miss by living in the States is snooker. Nobody over here knows anything about it; at least Americans have usually heard of cricket. So… no Pot Black on TV, no epic breaks played out while the opponent sits helplessly in the corner, and no snooker videogames. What’s an expat to do? So on my last trip to England, I visited a videogame store to examine the possibilities. They had a pre-owned copy of Sega’s World Snooker Challenge 2005 for the Sony PSP, which looked promising – the reviews at Amazon.co.uk are excellent. The only problem was that the back of the box had a “DVD Region 2” icon. Would it play in my US PSP? I decided to take the chance that it would, and bought the game. It turned out that it does work, and I’m rapidly finding that I have a personal time management problem with it….
😉
As I subsequently discovered, the PSP only enforces regional lockout for UMD movies, not for games. Printing a region code on the box was purely a scare tactic. I didn’t even bother to look at snooker games for the PlayStation, because I assumed that it would enforce lockout – but maybe that, too, is just an empty threat. Anyway, I’m hoping to replace my PS2 as soon as Outtastock.com shows that Nintendo Wiis are available!