Santa Claus is filling his bag with major holiday Wii titles a little early this year, but there’s a problem.

He’s not allowed to have them yet.

Rayman Raving Rabbids: TV Party and Animal Crossing: City Folk are hitting the streets early at select GameStop and Wal-Mart stores.

Beneficiaries of these early sales are showing proof of their purchases across the Web. GoNintendo and Wii Fanboy are running photos of opened cases, discs and manuals.

Major retailers have been breaking street dates for years. This year alone, blockbuster titles such as Rock Band 2 and Fallout 3 have slipped by cash registers prior to their scheduled release dates.

Though pleasing to lucky customers, publishers can levy penalties for broken street dates. Retail chain K-Mart was fined $10,000 in October for selling copies of Fable II in Australia prior to its release date.

A more serious financial wrist-slap, K-Mart was also prohibited from selling Gears of War 2 for the first two weeks of its availability.

Ubisoft’s third Rayman Raving Rabbids minigame installment, TV Party is scheduled to release Tuesday. Nintendo’s City Folk, the latest in its popular Animal Crossing simulation series, is due out Sunday.

I’ve had bad experiences at GameStop in the past, and I’ve let them be known here on Infendo, but today I think the cold, hard lump of ice that is my non-beating heart has begun to thraw. Just a little though.

Infendo reader Casey W. writes…

I just had a pretty good experience at Gamestop. They are having a special trade in bonus when you trade in games towards Super Mario Galaxy or Guitar Hero III (20% bonus). I traded in a ton of Wii and DS games that I wasn’t playing anymore and put it towards those games. On top of the 20% bonus, the manager signed me up for their “edge card” which gave me an additional 10% on trade-ins (and a year of Game Informer for free). Then, their was still some kind of special going on when you traded in Wii games and I got even more trade-in value! Seriously, some of the games I was trading in I got almost 50% of their retail value back in trade! I paid for Mario Galaxy, paid for Guitar Hero III (that’s $90 retail!), paid for Yoshi’s Island DS for Molly, and still had trade-in money left so I picked up Carnival Games for $10!

Like I told the Infendo crew this morning, I think I know how I’ll be getting myself a few games for an upcoming flight to Chicago (and Galaxy for, well, whenever)…

Surly not all game store clerks are douche bags? That’s right (as told by one Infendo reader) and don’t call me Shirley!

Seth tells the tale: I left work and headed to my local Game Stop… I immediately went up to the clerk and asked if there was any Metroid games left. His response: “Reservation?” So I was out of luck, but I got to talking to him and he was nice enough to actually check the shipping schedule to see when the next shipment might be. No avail there either.

He then mentioned that the Wii kiosk was actually playing the full game. I finished the first objective and went to give the wii-mote back to the clerk when I noticed a copy of MP3 on the counter. I was like “What is this?” He says “Metroid.” I say, “I know that but I thought you were all sold out.”

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