I wish it was out earlier than December also.

no chance for PAL regions getting it before Christmas now

Christmas?? Ha ha ha... at LEAST March '08.

I suppose they want both Galaxy and Brawl to be the games of their month. Putting them on Octobre or September would be risky because of GTAIV and Halo3.

In a way, this is the "most" hardcore of the three titles (Metroid & Galaxy). When it comes out - people will buy it.

Release too early - and gamers may skip on other titles.

Release too late, and you don't get enough sales/momentum for Xmas (anything closer than 2 weeks to Xmas is almost suicide IMO).

A week earlier - for Thanksgiving - would have been nice though. I do agree its an "odd" date. 

I think Metroid is the most hardcore of the three titles but that's just my opinion.

The game must be polished. Nintendo game quality dictates the release date, not the other way around.

You are anti-wii. You will stop posting about the wii right?

 No need to start an arguement. He just feels metroids more hardcore, and i agree with him. He can state his opinion whether he's "anti-wii" or not.

Well, the date is certainly better than launching in Q1 2008 like some other big titles on other platforms.

Eh the whole hardcore argument is overblown anyways. N64 released the Mario Party games. It was perfectly hardcore back then. I think the real definition of weather a game is hardcore or not is about the scale of the game. Take Wii play, it has games in it the equivelant of Pong. The idea that this game caused anymore than one person's weekend off to be diverted away from something like Galaxy is ludicrous. I think with this definition Super Smash Bros Brawl is actually more hardcore because look at the scale. They add like 50 characters into the game and dig through the entire Nintendo warchest to find them. Just the other day an Animal Crossing Stage was announced. That level of detail and tribute is just amazing.

Anyways, they are making it a distant release date so that they can finish everything. Like I said the scale is absolutely incredible. Oh and if you listen to the IGN podcasts, they talk about smash bros online and they brought up some very good reasoning on why Smash would have online play. Including that the director of Smash was insisting that everything Smash related be released over the website.

Lets see... I think this is how Nintendo viewed it:

August- Metroid Prime 3
September- Halo 3
October- Zelda Phantom Hourglass
November- Super Mario Galaxy
December- Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Pretty varied.