Viper tries to get Dr. Lime in a compromising position (or two) during the course of the latest Mailbag at Battleground: Halo.

Louis Wu at HBO has pointed out a writeup of the Offensive Tetraboxing LANfest he held recently. This one's by CYBRFRK, and it's called Cold plasma still sticks... Friendship, loyalty and gaming - the ideology of bungie.org. The writeup is great, and so are the photos.

SketchFactor pointed us through Truth & Reconciliation to a page at iGames where they are summarizing the Halo for Windows Worldwide Final results.

Currently it looks like Jonathan "Beast" Finglass of the UK is doing particularly well. It's not entirely clear to me if the tournament is over just yet; all the grids on that page are full, and the previous grids were named quarterfinals and semifinals, but there's no announcement of any winner there yet, but neither are there schedules up for more rounds, at least not yet.

Sketch promises a full writeup later in the week.

Webshift posted on the HBO forum that the makers of Nightmare Armor are doing a raffle. $5 gets you a chance to win a Master Chief's helmet.In other news, the pricing has been removed from the site due to some legal concerns, but they haven't been changed or reduced (darn).

Over in the HBO forum, RunningRiot voiced the common-enough question: why in-game and out-of-game pings to Halo servers often don't match up. Botman from Gearbox stopped in to provide the answer:

Let's say you can ICMP ping a host and average 80 ms. If the host's frame rate is 60 FPS, then your game ping time would be around 97ms. Now let's say the host's frame rate is 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS. 30 frames per second (1/30th of a second) is 33.333 milliseconds. So now your game ping time has gone to 113 milliseconds (80ms + 33ms). The game ping time depends on how quickly the server can respond to a client's request. The higher the frame rate for the server, the more rapidly the server can respond to clients and the lower the game ping time will be.

There's more detail to it than that, though, as well as a link to a longer article by Yahn Bernier from Valve on latency in games at Blue's News. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Forum Administrator Tonya Welch posted in one of the CPL forums that Halo will not be cut from their summer event; apparently the earlier threats to that effect caused some amount of controversy. Thanks Louis Wu at HBO.

Walshicus has drawn up an extensive map of the Halo universe drawing on the games and novels. It features three-dimensional coordinates for many locations, both as an image and as an Excel worksheet. He submitted it to HBO and Louis Wu put it up in their Miscellaneous section.

A BBCi article compares the experience of Halo LANfesting with watching porn as part of an examination of how popular Halo still is years after its initial release. But don't worry, it's a compliment:

But there is something genuinely special about a gathering for some offline multiplay, replete with booze, snacks and stream of banter, by turns good-natured, competitive, foul and surprisingly witty.

Sounds like he was at Louis Wu's last LANfest.

According to MacSoft, this second-in-24-hours patch for Mac Halo fixes "a random memory trasher in Halo's input system" which may have been causing the keyboard problems some reported with the 1.04 patch. This update also has a page at VersionTracker now, and is available from Rampancy (http://rampancy.net/machalo/halo_103-1041_updater.sit) and from RHL.

Editor's Note: The following is a press release sent to Rampancy by AEG. Click the "read more" link at the bottom of this summary to read the entire article, including a list of finalists.

Microsoft Game Studios today announced that 19 gamers representing nine nations will be duking it out on February 17 at the Halo® for Windows® Worldwide Championship in Los Angeles, California. The Halo for Windows Worldwide Championship is a truly global event; spanning more than 275 iGames centers and worldwide partners gaming centers across five continents, including locations in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Australia and the United Kingdom. The exciting championship and semifinal rounds will showcase some of the world's greatest Halo talent. Halo fans are invited to stop by and catch all the action, which starts at 1 p.m. PST on February 17. >From 6-10 p.m. PST, all fans are invited to come play Halo for free in a LAN frag-fest on 60 PCs.

This update synchronizes the Mac version with the PC version 1.04 allowing cross-platform multiplayer to again function. Requires Halo v1.03. NOTE: You should disable your anti-virus software before running the updater. If you are reinstalling Halo, you need to first download the 1.03 update and install it prior to installing the 1.04 update.

Download: http://rampancy.net/machalo/halo103-104_updater.sit

If you look at Randy Pitchford's .plan file through Blue's News, the project listings there are the same as they've been for some time:

1. Halo PC
2. Secret Sauce

"Secret Sauce" might have been the Halo Editing Kit before that was announced, but it might be something else all together.

Well, as of the 12th, that .plan file also contains a note that Gearbox is hiring level designers with UnrealEd and/or Worldcraft experience, indicating that another project either has been underway before now or is just starting up. Gearbox's Project Page still only lists PC Halo, along with a screenshot of the still-as-yet-unreleased Sapien.

Why should this matter to PC Halo fans?

Because typically, support and updates for a port of a game to another platform never goes on forever, and usually begins to wane when the porting house gets another project going. Gearbox has already begun to lay the blame for delays in getting patches and the HEK out at the feet of Bungie and Microsoft, and now with a push on to hire programmers for an effort with a completely different game engine by the look of it, and the release of Halo 2 for the Xbox to come later this year, what will be the fate of support for PC and Mac Halo?

Of course, Gearbox was always going to have to do more work; there's no way Microsoft would continue to pay them enough to get by just to make patches for PC Halo.