This is technically old news, but crikey, I had heard nothing of it until someone told me about it.
This is crazy. The import scene is important to this country, due to sony strangling us for release dates. This, and meeting their inept, stuck-up PR is all I need to dislike them mildly.
Not great news, really.
Seriously, making mod chips and the like illegal would only be acceptable if
a) you could buy NTSC consoles in the normal shops for a normal price
b) PAL adaptions did not suck compared to their NTSC versions, which is not the case at the moment, often PAL games are released a lot later, with graphics problems and (not in the UK, but generally) with messed up translations.
c) Every game released in North America was also released in Europe/Australia. Which is not the case.
Now, I don’t know how a) applies to the UK, but the above reasons are why I absolutely prefer NTSC games over PAL. 🙁
Someone needs to invent some sort of universal gaming module.