OK so as you all know I recently took a trip to the southern hemisphere on business, but while down there was able to do some very very brief research into South Africa's gaming setup - figured it was worth a topic just so the knowledge is in one spot. I've widened the scope of the thread to the entire continent because (a) I doubt that there'll be enough in any one nation for a huge amount of info and (b) we know very little about Sega's operations in the entire continent as a whole. Right, on to my information I found. I only had a chance to see modern consoles really - Wii, PS2, PS3, 360, PSP, Vita, DS, 3DS. All of these in the 3 or 4 places I looked without exception were PAL copies with PEGI stickers - likely imported stock from the UK (and maybe some from the Netherlands?), moreso as I saw BBFC ratings on at least one title and all the boxes I saw were in English. I did check the coloured stripes on the Nintendo boxes and saw green, light green, yellow and purple all used. Where shit gets interesting was that all aforementioned PAL games were stickered over with their local rating system: fpb. Of all places, the only sensible description I found of how they work is on Nintendo Europe's site: http://www.nintendo.co.za/NOE/en_ZA/service/age_rating_954.html These stack, eg I saw a 10LV sticker. Here are a few example logos as they appear stickered on games: This isn't all the levels used, as mentioned I saw a 10. Sega titles: I saw/remembered not that many (I was somewhat rushed at the main games shop I ended up in, and had someone with me at the time). As such, here's the entire list of ones I know: Mario & Sonic 2012 [3DS]: PG Bleach: The 3rd Phantom [DS]: 13V Sonic Unleashed [PS2]: PGV(? This one is from memory rather than a written note) Other relevant fpb links: http://www.fpb.org.za/classifications/distribution-and-display-of-games Any further research can proceed here, though the main problem will be finding a nice list of rated titles as fpb.org.za doesn't appear to have one.
My assumption is that South Africa is pretty much the only African country you're going to find large supplies of video games in. Too much war and famin and death to expect to find Dreamcasts, unless Mugabe has one. North African countries like Egypt and Tunisia are probably covered by "Europe" due to the border with the Mediterranean sea. Ster Kinekor Entertainment does PlayStation distribution in South Africa, as well as games from Sega and THQ and Konami and a bunch of others.
Work - we had a client down there getting a server upgrade, so I flew in for a week to build and deploy it. Managed to squeeze this little fact-finding side-trip into the week while at a shopping centre for other reasons.
