PAL GameCube haul from Kraków, Poland (EuroPython 2026)

While I was in Kraków, Poland during EuroPython 2026 I was able to sneak away from sprints and buy a few PAL region GameCube games for my collection. This was on Sunday, which means that many stores are closed until Monday... except for one! “Game Over” was open and the owner was very friendly and chatted with me as I browsed the selection.

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I purchased three complete-in-box games: The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker & Ocarina of Time Master Quest (UK),Pikmin (UK), and Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg (Swedish/Finnish). Prior to these new purchases the only PAL title I owned wasPikmin 2, as this was necessary to complete thePikmin 2 International Treasure Hoard.

The fun thing about PAL releases is that they are usually the last release a game receives in terms of time, so these revisions often have the most bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements compared to earlier revisions. They also often support multiple languages and have unique box and disk artwork.

The most exciting game I purchased was Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with the Ocarina of Time Master Quest bonus disk included. This is my first multi-disk GameCube game that I own, and I'm excited to see if it's possible to extract the N64 ROMs from the ISO likeZelda Collector’s Edition. You can see the box has a “flap” with a second disk tray, allowing two games to be included.

The second game is Pikmin, which the PAL region has relatively few changes. The major change is that you can skip the End of Day cutscenes, which you'll likely be watching 10-15 times on a typical playthrough. This small change makes the PAL revision the definitive edition;)

Another small change for Pikmin is the manual. This game had to introduce the world to Pikmin which are very, very small. Depending on your region the height of Olimar, the protagonist of Pikmin, is compared either to a “US quarter” or a “50 pence piece”.

Finally, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg. This is one of my favorite games ever, I've played it through to 99% completion multiple times (the last emblem is not fun to achieve). It's a different game, if you like action adventure then maybe you'll have fun with it, but in particular it's mostly a special title for me. I purchased this one in particular because I didn't have a single “Player’s Choice” for the PAL region which feature silver splines instead of the typical yellow splines for NTSC-J/NTSC.

I was able to dump the ROMs from each of these disks easily using aFlippyDrive-modded GameCube and the included backup utility. I've been thinking about investing in an OmniDrive-compatible disk reader so that I don't have to use my GameCube for this task to avoid tiring out the laser. Maybe a gift idea for the future?

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