Topic: Can the NES top-loader play ALL PAL NES games?...

I own an NES top-loader, but have been told that it cannot play the PAL NES game Elite. I'm confused by this, because I thought that the top-loader was capable of playing all PAL games. And, as highly-rated as the NES port of Elite is, I will buy it if my top-loader will play it. I live in the United States, if that helps.

The top-loader can play PAL games, but it doesn't mean it will play them all glitch-free.
PAL is a different TV format, that runs at a different resolution and frame rate than NTSC.
Many games will play fine since many games were originally developed in NTSC and PAL publishers were often lazy and just released NTSC games in PAL regions without caring about the differences.
As for PAL games that were designed in PAL, it would depend on just how timing sensitive they are. Many games can run in NTSC with only an unintended speed-up (caused by the frame rate difference).
Some other games used timing chips (which were dependent on the CPU speed as a time unit) just for like a screen-split, so they were still playable with maybe a glitched HUD. (I hear if you pay hundreds of dollars for a Mr. Gimmick, hope you don't mind no HUD)

Oddly enough the PAL version of Dragon's Lair runs better than the NA version on a top-loader. Though that's because they just made the game less sucky when it was released in Japan and EU.