False alarm, European SG readers. You won’t be receiving this article any later than anybody else in the world; everybody will receive it at the same time. It’s alright.

The thing is, in 2008, a lot of games didn’t receive the same treatment, which is a huge shame. Find out why this is #33 in our Top Gaming Moments of 2008 after the jump!

Since before my introduction into the SG writing team earlier this year, resident readers might have noticed I’ve held a bit of a vendetta against a certain Japanese electronics company, and have taken great pleasure in dissecting every last Euro-phobic announcement and asking, time and time again, why this sort of thing keeps happening? Releases (usually digital ones) seemed to take an unusually long time to arrive on European shores and we’d never get an explanation.

At E3, Sony spent no time in quickly uploading their conference to the PlayStation Store in the US so that all the new trailers could be replayed in HD. Europe, on the other hand, received nothing, presumably because of localization, where content is translated into different languages; however, when the clips finally appeared they were delivered with the message that they were only available in English, making the delay entirely inexplicable.

What’s more, digital movie downloads in Europe are a long way off, and we in Europe are still waiting for plenty of downloadable games that Americans have had for months – it took a year and a half for Super Puzzle Fighter to hit European PS Stores; let’s hope it doesn’t get worse that that. And don’t, just don’t, get me started on Home.

I could go on about Sony in Europe for a very, very long time but I wont, and will instead leave you to peruse the SG archives if you so wish (I advise here, and here and over at the European PlayStation community, where one article inspired a short-lived campaign). The thing is, they’re not alone in neglecting certain corners of the market.

EA seriously screwed up when it came to releasing Rock Band on the ‘other’ side of the Atlantic. While everybody Stateside could purchase the game in Fall last year, 360 owners in Europe had to wait until summer this year to buy it for themselves. As if it couldn’t be any more messed-up, American gamers could buy Rock Band 2 before European PS3 owners could even buy the original game and even then were charged the equivalent of around $350 to buy the whole package. How does that work!?

Even Valve has gotten in on the act, with Steam restricting gamers in certain countries from buying some of the games on the store. This prompted the creation of a protest group, Rest of the World, who are still actively pursuing change in international markets to this very day. European delays are everywhere.

Certainly, we’ve (I’ve) poked fun at the subject but it’s a pretty annoying matter, especially when so much of it goes unexplained. Europe’s been forever getting the shaft when it comes to content, pricing (it still costs more to buy a game over in Europe) and generally seems to get the sharp end of the stick for anything gaming related. Unfortunately, it’s a trend that doesn’t show any signs of stopping, and for that this rather nasty injustice slots in at #33 on our Top 100 Gaming Moments of 2008.