JTait

"Halo has one of the best video game stories ever made, and ties into the Marathon Series."

Emphasis on video game story. Compared to any other narrative medium, the Halo story is garbage. To claim otherwise is to reveal how poorly read someone is.

"Plus everything that happens in the game has a reference to revalations in the Bible, which adds in making the story seem real."

The obtuse literary allusions in Halo are mostly from the book of Genesis, not Revelations. And those allusions hardly make the story anymore literary. Rather they allow those reared on pop-culture to think they are experiencing a more sophisticated story than is really there, like with The Matrix.

I'm calling BS on this.

A pound of fat is 3500 stored calories. In order to lose a pound you therefore have to create a calorie deficit of 3500 calories. So in order to lose a pound a week you need a 500 calorie deficit a day. In order to lose 41lbs over 90 days that means you'd need a DAILY calorie deficit of roughly 1600 calories. Unless this guy is still in his teens, which sounds unlikely, 1600 calories is about what his body needs to support a completely sedentary lifestyle. Therefore without adding any exercise, he would need to eat absolutely nothing for three months to lose 41lbs of fat.

Given that he did his biking while playing a game he can't have been biking too vigorously or his body movement would interfere with his ability to play. Additionally, 100+ hours of biking over three months is roughly 1 hour a day. Biking at a moderate intensity for an hour only burns approximately 500 calories a day. Additonally, weight lifting is only likely to burn about 250 calories per hour. So assuming he biked an hour and lifted an hour every day (which is a recipe for overtraining, so I suspect the actualy volume of exercise was less), he would theoretically only be able to eat 750 calories a day for three months. Realistically it would have to be even less to allow for rest days from training, because an out of shape, sedentary body would simply not be able to handle a that high a volume of training without a lengthy trainup period.

Unless you are an extremely heavy set man, getting to 271lbs takes years of unhealthy eating and exercise habits. As we all know habits are really hard to break once they are ingrained. Therefore, if we are to believe this story we have to believe that, through the magic of Warcraft, an unhealthy, out of shape gamer was able to start exercising for two hours every day for three months subsisting off of two very moderately sized meals a day. I find that hard to accept.

Guys, from Microsofts perspective shipped = sold. Microsoft does not run it's own store and sell it's consoles there. Instead microsoft manufacturers the console and sells them to electronic wholesalers who then sell to retailers such as best buy, who then turns around and sells them to consumers. Supply chain people. Microsoft makes money when they sell the console to the wholesaler, not when a consumer buys one at best buy. That only 12% of Best Buy's resupply has sold is best buy's problem, not Microsoft. Granted slow sales arn't good in the long term, but once the consoles have shipped, Microsoft has made the money it's going to make off of that batch of consoles.

That said it probably wouldn't hurt for Joystiq to be consistent in it's language and stick with either sold or shipped.