Australians absolutely have credit cards. The previous poster seems to be getting their information from a single Aussie.

I couldn’t find numbers specifically for the percentage of people who have at least one card, but the total number of CC accounts indicates that it’s likely that the majority of working adults have one. That being said, credit card usage is low compared to other countries, I suspect because the government made the banks get together and create a universal electronic payment network in the 1980s, and we’ve all been used to paying virtually anywhere with our regular ATM cards, direct from our normal bank accounts, for decades. Credit cards are primarily used for, y’know, credit, and not just everyday transactions.

And for all the talk of the credit card companies, my personal experience with online payment processors has been that they often won’t accept Cirrus or VISA Debit cards, or at least not cards issued outside their own country. So online shopping can be difficult without a credit card.

You’re right about the incompatibility between NTSC and PAL, but deliberate region locking was common, even in the 8-bit era. It was very much the norm rather than the exception. Also, on older consoles they simply slowed the main CPU speed down for PAL so that everything in the system matched up with the video framerate. If you’ve ever read about how PAL versions of 8-bit and 16-bit games run slower than the NTSC versions, that’s why. And it meant that you could plug out-of-region cartridges into your console, and if you could get around the region locking, they’d often work with minimal or no visual issues, just a little slower, because the video output was hardwired for PAL in the console. I played a few Japanese games on my PAL Mega Drive and SNES back in the day, on a PAL-only TV.

The PS1 and PS2 (both very much with region locking) had a weird thing going on where any console from any region could output both NTSC and PAL, depending on what the software asked for. I believe the GameCube and Dreamcast were similar; I ran original NTSC game discs on PAL versions of all of them.

In terms of what TVs would support, you’re right that it wasn’t until the late 1990s that fully dual-mode PAL/NTSC TVs started to become common, but that’s not the same thing as 50Hz vs 60Hz. CRT TVs were designed to work best at a certain frequency, but they were also designed to cope with variations in the signal and power supply. Most PAL CRT TVs are actually capable of synching at 60Hz, which is where “PAL-60” comes in. PAL-60 is an unofficial “standard” in which the video signal runs at the NTSC framerate and vertical resolution, but with a PAL colour subcarrier. I used PAL-60 on many TVs, some produced as far back as the early 1980s, and never found one that wouldn’t sync with it. I had a very inexpensive (Under AU$15 IIRC) NTSC-to-PAL-60 “converter” for the PS1/2 that I used to play NTSC games. You mentioned VCRs; there were VCRs that specifically played NTSC video cassettes as PAL-60. They weren’t common, but they existed.

I remember when Metroid Prime 2 came out (I still have my copy) and there was indeed a small controversy in the gaming press about the PAL version being 60Hz only, but it was PAL-60, not NTSC, and I played the whole game on a PAL TV that definitely did not support NTSC, without any trouble.

I was reminded that I have a copy of Control (2019) that I hadn’t touched, so a couple of weeks ago I started playing it. I was really enjoying it for a few hours, but it started to feel a bit repetitive and I haven’t been able to get back to it for a few days.

As I clicked on this thread I was literally thinking “Oh geez, are we still going to be able to get the older versions if we don’t have freeon-cooled quantum processors and 32 teraquads of RAM?” I’m glad I’m not alone.

The original book of “Ready Player One” had a secret ARG, not unlike the one the main characters in the book take on. But as far as anyone can tell, no-one found it or even thought to look for it. Ten months after publication, the author Ernest Cline finally made an announcement about it.

The “trailhead” (starting clue/puzzle) was hidden in an almost identical way to the one in the story, and there was an empty leaderboard on his website just the same, too, but somehow no-one picked up on any of it. It must have been driving him and the publishers mad.

TIL that cheap fanny packs can apparently now be called “cross-body packs” in a vain effort to make us forget how uncool they are.

Honestly, I think it would’ve been better if they’d leaned into it as a retro 80s/90s thing and just called it a fanny pack. It’s already hideous, anyway.

Edit for clarification: There are things that I would happily and unironically call a “cross-body pack”. But IMO the picture on that website is of a fanny pack.

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A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.

If you play the game normally, you’ll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.

If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you’ll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game’s universe, including linking it more directly to the developer’s previous game, Ico.

For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.