>So I imagine the games would play quite similarly, just with a lower refresh rate in Europe?

That was my assumption as well! But nope, gameplay was coupled to framerate for a surprising range of years.

You can see comparisons on YouTube, check the music of the pal/ntsc version of sonic for the genesis/megadrive.

Apparently it was still happening to some extent during the PSX era. I remember the turn meter bars in FF7 filled very slow, and this explains it.

If you have an original copy of Grim Fandango, the elevator-and-forklift puzzle is impossible without a patch, since the scene moves at (iirc) the processors clock speed, so modern CPUs ran too quickly to make the action possible to solve the puzzle.

This is obviously fixed in the remastered version, though