is PAL = USA & NTSC = JAP or which is which?

Not strictly true.

France and the former Eastern Europe use SECAM as standard (800+ lines).

US/Canada/Japan and a few others use NTSC (525 lines at 60Hz)

Botswana uses PAL 625 lines at 60Hz

The rest of the world uses PAL 625 lines at 50Hz.

Now to the original question:

i see all these PAL, NTSC, patch this to be that posts, but wtf do i need? i have a backup of my Wipeout fusion game that doesn't work on my (usa) PS2... what version ps2 do i have? which is the game?

A PS2 plays both PAL and NTSC games once you've chipped it. You dodn't describe what goes wrong so I'll assume a rolling picture or Black and White.

If the game plain doesn't play, then the copy is bad.

For the video symptoms I've described, US/Canada users are worse off than Europeans. North American continent TVs are strapped to NTSC (except the latest widescreens - Euro TVs can play NTSC and PAL). So you have to patch the game. You go to ####://www.megagames.com and look for a patch for Wipeout Fusion that changes PAL to NTSC.

Then you copy the game to hard disk using CDRWin (####://www.goldenhawk.com)

Then you patch the game with PPF-O-MATIC (####://www.megagames.com)

Then you burn the patched game back to CD-R with CDRWin.

Tutorials on ####://www.psxcopyworld.co.uk