The likes of David Bayon and Mike Jennings can keep their PS3s and their GTA IVs. Me, I’m much more excited about tomorrow’s UK release of Super Smash Bros Brawl (SSBB to its friends).

Excited — but also apprehensive, because, let’s face it, Nintendo doesn’t exactly have a great record on stock availability. My experience of actually using the Wii has been entirely positive; but buying it, and then buying games and accessories for it, has involved a surprising amount of anxiously standing in queues at stupid times of the morning. Because if you miss the first shipment of games/controllers/consoles, you may not have another chance to buy the thing you want for weeks or even months.

(Yes, I know I should pre-order. I tried that with the Wii console itself and all I got was an email the day before launch saying they didn’t have enough stock. Shut up.)

It’s frustrating, but I can sort of understand why it happens. Obviously it takes time and money to manufacture these things, and if you’re manufacturing them in advance of a launch it also costs money to store them until the big day. So, logically, it makes sense to produce as few copies as you can get away with for launch – just the minimum needed to stir up demand for subsequent shipments. These can then be supplied more cheaply, because they don’t need to be stored.

(It’s also risky to produce millions of units before you have a realistic indication of demand – a lesson nicely illustrated back in the eighties.)

All of which reminds me, in a roundabout way, of the recent arrival of the new ATI Radeon HD 4000 series. You may have noticed the slightly unorthodox two-stage launch, which saw us publish a more or less full review of the HD 4850 – minus technical details – last week, followed by yesterday’s report on the internals. I have to admit, it surprised me.

There’s no official word on why things happened this way, but hey, speculation is free. Naturally, the new cards needed to be manufactured ahead of the launch. And while Nintendo can afford to be conservative with its launches, each of AMD’s manufacturing partners will have wanted to have plenty of stock available on day one. Let’s be honest, if there are no Brand X HD 4870s to be had, most consumers will just buy a Brand Y card instead. It’s the same GPU, after all.

So, this time last week, there were probably hundreds of thousands of brand new Radeon graphics cards sitting around in manufacturer and retailer warehouses all across the world, gathering dust and waiting for launch day. Under the circumstances, who’d be surprised if one or two cards fell into the hands of well-connected enthusiasts, eager to try out the new card and share their experiences on the internet…?

In that context, AMD’s response makes sense. It could hardly put the genie back in the bottle, but equally it couldn’t, at such short notice, bring the launch forward – at least, not without screwing up a lot of people’s plans, including those of its manufacturing partners. So in the end its managers took the view that, if the card was going to be previewed on the web, it should be previewed by people who were able to do it properly. (And by this I mean no disrespect to non-journalists, who are by all accounts lovely people. But even die-hard PC enthusiasts probably aren’t in a position to do the kind of extensive head-to-head testing we perform in our labs.)

So in the end, a selection of reputable reviewers (preen, preen) were invited to publish previews ahead of the official launch, while the technical specs, and full availability, were held back until yesterday.

So, how did this relate to my Wii game again? Well, I have to admit, it’s not a perfect analogy. There’s no question of a stock shortage for the Radeon HD 4850. And, sad to say, I haven’t found a retailer naughtily selling Super Smash Bros Brawl ahead of its launch.

But still, it’s a story that gives me hope. Because it reminds me that items don’t just miraculously spring into being at midnight on launch day. Like the HD 4850 last week, SSBB is officially no more than a promise for the future — yet, even as I type this, there are doubtless thousands of very real copies sitting in crates in back rooms up and down Oxford Street. It’s in the wings right now, ready and waiting for its cue to step out of the shadows and onto the shelves.

And I know it doesn’t make any sense; but somehow it’s a good feeling to know that SSBB has, in some sense, already landed. It gives me a little more confidence that, when tomorrow comes, and I’m standing in that queue… perhaps – just perhaps – there’ll be a copy with my name on it.

Sincerely yours, Pikachu.