For 90s consoles and earlier, yes. For the PS2/GameCube generation a lot of developers did a better job (but not Square, FFX was slow and squashed in its PAL version).

It stems from the fact that our TV system runs at 50Hz instead of 60Hz. The way they used to deal with this was by literally slowing the game down by that amount (sometimes it was done at the console level, they actually made the CPU run at a lower clock speed).
Proper conversions compensate by speeding the gameplay up by the amount the engine was slowed down (like DKC) but cheap conversions didn't compensate at all, so the game runs at 5/6 the speed.

There are videos on youtube demonstrating the differences for a few games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4gKOD4K088 (even the music is sluggish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7h9htbYDss (look how squashed everyone was D:)

I don't remember it being that bad but that just looks horrible in comparison. =)

Oh good god those PAL versions. They kind of looked fine (well, despite the FFX one being squashed), but the speed they were running at would drive me crazy.

they have sold an HD version of the game on there site for the past few years.

It came out last year on the Square-Enix store. o.O

And it's not HD version, they fiddled with it to make it work on newer systems and added a couple of extraneous features like cloud saves, achievements, and a trainer for instantly maxing out character stats and gil.

Well, the person who made the video seems to have screwed up a bit. They have both versions of FFX stretched to widescreen, so even the NTSC one is squashed. The PAL one is doubly squashed though (PAL + inappropriate use of widescreen).

I wonder when Final Fantasy IX will come to Steam. The main character has a monkey tail.

As far as I know, IX never had a PC release. Only VII and VIII did, unfortunately. So, unless Square-Enix decides to make a port of it out of the blue, you won't see it on Steam ever. :(

NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Yea its disapointing. I wonder if the reason they never bothered to port it was due to the poor sales of the previous ports (square's fault tbh) or because it was not ment to be a FF to begin with.

But gog needs to get on it and get 7 on there store front.