Let me relate a couple factoids of information from my retail experience.

I work at a computer retail store (which shall remain nameless), and recently, we received our advance copies of Super Smash Brothers Brawl, which does not release until the ninth. Specifically, we received twenty copies of the game, packaged in neat little shrink-wrapped four-packs.

However, some silly worker decided, in a fit of...I don't even KNOW what, decided to leave the games sitting on the counter in the gaming department, unsecured, not even hidden all that well.

So I wander over there with a coworker in the course of our duties, and he notices the copies of Brawl, and says, "Oh, hey, this is Brawl...oh wait...Hey, {Claymore}, take a look. These are four-packs..." He shows me one of the four-packs, "...but this is three." He points out three individual copies of Brawl. The logical assumption is that someone broke open the four-pack and took one.

Whoever took it and whoever left it were caught on camera, though, so if it was internal (which it could be), someone's gonna get canned.

In retrospect I'm surprised that whoever it was didn't just take all of them.

Factoid Two!

Our store's LP policy is crap. We have no external loss prevention team; the associates are expected to police the customers at the same time they're supposed to handle downstocking and fronting (bringing stock down from upper shelves or in the back, and pulling the product on the shelf to the front, respectively) AND sales. Too much for everyone to do at once. So, because of that (and because noone is watching the security cams live), we get a lot of problems with shrink. If you don't want to take the jump, the tl;dr version is that shrink refers to the total amount of product rendered unsaleable due to either theft or damage. Upper management's jobs are in jeopardy (Yes, Corporate said "shape up or you're fired) because the total shrink amount, since we opened (only four months) is upwards of $200K. Yow.

Bonus fact! Our cashier line sucks. Typically we'll have two or three people manning the lines. Good enough for a slow day, maybe. But when the floodgates open, holy crap. Lines backed up to God knows where it'll end.

So there're some rumors going around that there's a Halo movie release slated for 2009. Alex Garland is on board for writing the screenplay (way back in '05), and Peter fucking JACKSON is on board as executive producer. Neill Blomkamp, of Alive in Joburg (Haven't heard of it? It's okay, neither had I) is directing.

20th Century Fox is in development, under oversight by Microsoft. Blomkamp has declared the project "dead," but Jackson is confident it'll come through. Blomkamp was concerned that, while Master Chief undoubtedly worked flawlessly as a video game character, the transition to a movie star would be shaky, due to his facelessness. Blomkamp stated that Master Chief didn't emotionalize enough to be an effective movie star; rather, the other characters would do most of the emotional work.

I personally think that a Halo movie would kick ass. There are some awesome goddamn live-action movies of what could become parts of the Halo movie.

What would also be awesome is if they made movies that more fully explored the parts of the story that were left unsaid; a full treatment of the novel Halo: The Fall of Reach (the prequel to Halo) would be interesting, as would a backstory of the UNSC.

All in all, I'm excited.