It took ‘em long enough! After much (possibly unnecessary) deliberation, Sony’s European arm of its gaming division has announced the release date for LittleBigPlanet in European, Middle Eastern and Oceanic territories.

Here’s the thing though; it’s flexible! Hit the jump for more details.

First off, here’s that date, sort of: you can expect to see LittleBigPlanet in the territories listed above “no later than the week commencing Monday 3rd November”, according to the press release issued today. So wait, is that by Monday or by the Sunday of that week (the 9th)?

I can understand the ambiguity of the release date. As far as I can see, the game will be available from Monday the 3rd in some areas, and the availability will increase over the week until every store has the game again in Qur’an-free form.

Naturally, Sony would be insane to delay the game any longer and are essentially telling shops to sell the game as soon as they receive it, in order to beckon back those insane enough to cancel their pre-orders just because the game was recalled out of respect.

Certainly, it didn’t take Sony Computer Entertainment America long to decide that Sackboy would hit the stores on October the 27th. Then again, SCEE doesn’t have a tiny handful of countries to deal with, in the way that SCEA has only the Americas and Canada to redistribute to. SCEE has to deal with every country in Europe that sells PlayStations, Middle Eastern countries, Australia and New Zealand.

It’s a pretty wide geographical spread and so to redistribute LittleBigPlanet across what is essentially most of the world in a week will be nothing short of a miracle, and it is with a doff of my hat (if I had one) I’m praising Sony for both showing respect for the beliefs of a religion and for taking relatively swift action to ensure the game makes its way to stores as quickly as possible, and with the least offense.

There you go. Stop complaining and start getting excited again. Two weeks to go. Unless you shop at Play.com, who (unless they’ve just not bothered changing their date) should be sending you a copy right now, as they still list the game as being released on the 24th. With no recall emails going out, you wonder if they’ve been fortunately ignorant of what’s been going on. Fingers crossed.

NEW RELEASE DATE FOR LITTLEBIGPLANET CONFIRMED… – Three Speech