In theory PAL is superior, I know. But that doesn't help if the game is developed with NTSC in mind and doesn't get adapted to the PAL format. Are you sure with your comparison? I not only saw it myself, but also read about it in magazines and remember heated forum discussions when the game was released. The game has black bars at the top and bottom as you would expect from a game that doesn't make use of PAL's higher vertical resolution and is also slower than its NTSC counterpart. I can't imagine that Australia got its own PAL version. It's also likely that you'll never think that anything might be wrong with the picture if you don't know the NTSC version. Since you do know it there was either some time between you seeing the NTSC version and compared it to the PAL one or the Australian PAL version is indeed different from the European PAL version, which would be odd, to say the least.