Well, the original date slipped a week for seemingly no good reason. I thought perhaps it was to match it up with the release of the 40gb unit as part of a big marketing push. Now I'm just confused. It certainly can't be because of reviews - all of the early impressions have been positive.

And Lair was weird because it was only released early in some stores like GameStop - Best Buy waited until the listed release date.

One of the best series on the Playstation, too bad the numbers on this site appear to be massively undertracking the Ratchet series. And missing major parts of the data for the newest one on the PS2.

i know several people that dont think so highly of SMG. the whole planet hoping thing gets in the way of the whole Mario thing i guess.

i'll probably get it eventually, ratchet comes first though.

That one made me laugh out loud.

They probably did it for both reasons. A better question to ask, is why wouldn't they release it earlier? 

Its too bad this game falls outside of the timeline of the Toys R Us buy 2 get one free sale by 3 days.
I'm still buying the crap out of this game though.

 Thats exactly what i was thinking, if it is ready, then who cares when SMG is coming out (or any other game for that matter), it'll sell more the earlier it is put on shelves (as long as its the same end product as the one that was supposed to be released a week later, which is most likely the case)

 I'm not sure, I was in to playing games when the previous games came out. But, if this game scores really well across the board, I think this game could do great on it's first week. However I'd imagine it would fall rather quickly, but loiter at the 35-40k mark through the Christmas months.

I think this game could cause some people to make the jump. You have the PS3 fans who suck up every game
that comes their way, and you have the people (like me) who have been waiting for a game like this to be
released. For me, the game drought has been since launch (with Resistance and CoD3) with the exclusion of Warhawk over this Christmas I will be getting this game, Uncharted and the Simpsons game.

Heavenly didn't sell 'thanks' to it's length and it's niche market, L.A.I.R just plain sucked and Warhawk was
online only. This could be the first truely great game for the PS3.

In other words, I'm not sure whether the previous installments got in the first week would be a very good
indicator of how this is going to do. The situations are very different library wise for the PS3.