"Now witness the fire power of this fully armed and operational battlestation!"

After two years at the top of the Xbox charts, Halo has finally proven the wise Confucian adage, "All other games can just piss off and die." And how did it achieve this Zen-like state of violent nirvana? By selling over FOUR MILLION copies worldwide, as of the end of December. That's right, and we don't mean four million shipped, or imagined, or promised, we mean, over four million copies, bought and paid for, by actual Earthmen.

The upswing in sales is not entirely unexpected, since tens of thousands of newbie Xbox owners bought the game in droves (Halo was the second biggest selling Xbox game during the Holidays), and got to enjoy the bargain price of $29.99 which as you all know, represents an unbeatable Happiness-Matrix of less than 3 cents per metric ton of amusement.

This (continued) success comes as its online-capable PC sibling, Halo PC, smashes through the half-million barrier, making it one of the most successful (and widely-played) PC games of 2003, and that half-million figure doesn't even include the newly-released Macintosh (Halo fans remember that the game was originally unveiled on Mac at a Macworld expo - although other versions were in the works) OSX version.

HYPERFACT* At the current sales pace, there will be more copies of Halo than there are human beings on Earth, by the year 3254. It is expected however that at least one new generation of the Xbox will be here by then.

*"Hyper" in no way implies good or useful.