also sometimes done with consoles; shops offering advance PSP imports recently made news when Sony took action against them. Financial reasons. Due to high release-prices, it is often considerably cheaper for gamers to buy Japanese (non-domestic) versions of popular games that have already passed out of the "new release" phase of their marketing in the foreign country. Furthermore, because of variations in international exchange rates and international video game market demand, import gamers may save money by importing games instead of buying localized versions, even when shipping and handling costs and import tax are taken into consideration. This is also true within the used games market offering used import games way cheaper than local new games due to the localization delay. Before, however, the introduction of the Euro, new import games were commonly sold 40% more expensive by import shops than the European local edition. Similar price disparities exist between American and Asian markets. Additionally, certain retro games no longer being manufactured are much rarer and thus more expensive in domestic markets, while Japanese copies are more abundant and therefore cheaper. Technical issues. US and Japanese games were historically developed with NTSC television specs (480 lines, 60 Hz) in mind. PAL specs (576 lines, 50 Hz) used in the EU required changes to the source code of these games. While some games were rewritten accordingly, some weren't (or were done so only partially). Issues include black bars on top and bottom of the picture to make up for the 96 missing lines, resulting in a distorted image. Due to the different refresh ratio, some PAL games are about 17% slower than their NTSC counterpart. An infamous example would be the entire SquareEnix lineup on Sony systems, as well as other RPGs of different make. Users could often override these effects by applying their own software or hardware modifications to their setup (thus forcing the PAL software back into its native 480i/60 Hz resolution), but this may be out of the scope of some users, could potentially invalidate the system warranty (as opening up older cartridge-based machines was necessary to force 60 Hz), and in some instances could disrupt "PAL optimisations" that the coder applied (such as PAL-optimised video or 576i menu screens – even where the game itself was not PAL-optimized). Another factor to consider is that certain features are inherently included with software in some territories (such as the