PAL region

The PAL region (PAL being short for Phase Alternating Line) is a television publication territory that covers most of Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and Oceania. It is so named because of the PAL television standard traditionally used in those regions, as opposed to the NTSC standard traditionally used in Japan and the United States, which both produce a large portion of the world's televisions.

Most video games designated as part of the region will not play on NTSC-U/C or NTSC-J region consoles because of regional lockout. While this is the most common occurrence, some Xbox and Xbox 360 games are region-free encoded, since Microsoft's policy is for publishers to decide. Sony has a similar policy for the PlayStation Portable, but most publishers choose not to encode a region on their UMD games. With the exception of Persona 4 Arena, PlayStation 3 Blu-ray Disc games are region-free. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are completely region free, allowing usage in all standards regions, although the Xbox One was originally going to have region locking before changing this due to consumer outcry. All Nintendo home consoles have region locking either by software encoding or physical differences in media and consoles.